My aim is to apply multiple art disciplines to reach outside the art world to facilitate local meetups and random conversations. Foo Dogs of North Shore is an interactive project centered around dog owners and residents of Chicago’s North Shore community.
The main artwork I produce in this series is an immersive, mixed media collage installation, composed of photographs, found objects, and digital art. I convert the individual dog portraits into building blocks and arrange them to create a visual effect of a new compound image. To document the project’s progression, I am building personalized web pages that show the current position of the individual dog portraits in the larger artwork. The website component is dynamic: it reflects the shifting arrangements of the portraits as new dogs enroll in the project.
Naming the project Foo Dogs of North Shore encapsulates the geographic area where I regularly interact with art friends, and the symbolism of foo dogs as an expression of positive energy and good fortune. Rooted in ancient Chinese Buddhism, foo dogs traditionally appear in pairs – two parts, yin and yang – where each part requires the other part to manifest the whole. Conceptually, they are an apt representation of my random encounters with neighborhood dogs and the way I set the individual portraits alongside one another to construct the artwork.
This project is led by Nurit Pazner and is supported by the Incubator Project program at AIR Studio + Gallery in Glencoe, Illinois.
