ONE WORD
Seymour at the Cutlog Art Fair in Paris

Collaboration with the Creative Growth Art Center

October 18-21, 2012

Bourse du Commerce

2 Rue de Viarmes  

75001 Paris, France

Seymour was invited by the legendary Creative Growth Art Center to create a site-specific project for visitors to their booth at the Cutlog art fair, which took place from October 18 – 21, 2012 at the Bourse de Commerce in Paris.

Inspired by the artists from the center as well as Carl Jung’s theories of the personal and collective unconscious, the project’s goal was to encourage visitors to explore their subconscious minds and by extension, establish a dialogue between themselves and the artist.

The artists from the Creative Growth Art Center all have developmental, mental and/or physical disabilities, many are non-verbal and often, the work they create is their only means through which to communicate their thoughts and ideas. We thought it would be an interesting exercise to reduce our participants means of communication to one written word.
 
The project presented visitors with this abstract drawing by Creative Growth Art Center artist Dan Miller. Unbeknownst to most participants, though the final product appears ‘abstract’, all Dan Miller’s drawings begin with words. He then progressively obscures the words with increasingly dense layers of gestural lines. Dan’s work seems to flow directly from his subconscious mind onto the paper and is in essence an untainted graphic representation of his thoughts. View a video of Dan Miller creating a drawing in real time below:

We were also curious to see how the creative minds (artists, gallerists, visitors) present at the Cutlog Art Fair would intuitively react to the same image. Would there be a pattern in their responses? Would the results vary wildly? Two hundred and thirty-three (233) people participated in this project.

The project instructions were as follows:

1. What is the first word that comes to your mind when you look at the drawing above?
[Click: here to view the drawing we presented.]

2. Write the word on the card provided and place the card in the slot below.

3. Visit www.seymourprojects.com/projects on Monday, October 22rd to see how your intuitive personal reaction corresponds with what other participants wrote.

To get an idea of what the responses looked like, watch the video below:

To read the full list of responses, scroll down. Some have been translated from French. Words which were repeated more than once, figure at the start of the list with the corresponding number of repetitions noted next to the word in question:

We bet you’re also curious to know some of the words Dan Miller placed within this particular work.

Here they are:

Light. On. Off.