The exhibit by smudge studio included USM art students and featured a 20-foot-long wall drawing and polaroid images of Casco Bay. smudge is a Brooklyn-based collaboration between Jamie Kruse, an artist, designer, and independent scholar, and Elizabeth Ellsworth, an artist, and Professor of Media Studies at the New School, New York. smudge states that their work “meets sites and moments where the geologic and the human converge. We creatively responded to the complex of forces we encounter there: “the natural, built, historical, social, strategic and the imagined.”
While on the USM campus for a week in October as a visiting artist collective, smudge visited with art education and digital art classes and conduct a workshop on a Casco Bay Lines mail boat tour with art students. Students created material for the exhibit and “use the Portland mail boat tour as a means for locating ourselves physically in the midst of forces (natural, social, economic, temporal).” The Japanese term Zuihitsu encompasses non-linear modes such as “letting the brush lead.” The root of the word is the character “Zui,” meaning: “at the mercy (of the waves).” smudge will invite students “to develop ways to both sense and ‘signal’ or creatively respond to ‘the mercy of the waves—the swerves in perspective, perception, understanding, sensation, attraction, imagination—that take place when we are en route.” Works of graphic design and photographs from other smudge projects were also on display.
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