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AWOL: Bus Chronicles

A public art installation by Valerie Brodar

The Gallery of Contemporary Art at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs (GOCA), the City of Colorado Springs and Mountain Metropolitan Transit are proud to announce a new public art installation, Bus Chronicles by renowned artist and UCCS faculty member Valerie Brodar. This project is part of the AWOL: Art Without Limits. A new program developed by GOCA to create new forums for discussion on art and culture through site specific installations, happenings and non-traditional exhibition spaces. Bus Chronicles will be the third project in this year-long series and is made possible, in part, by a generous grant from the Pikes Peak Community Foundation.

Bus Chronicles is a collection of eighty poems composed in seventeen lines. Each chronicle is a fictional narrative based on unobtrusive and celebratory observations of passengers who ride the Colorado Springs Mountain Metropolitan Transit fixed route bus system. The project has two components, visual texts on the windows of each bus and an audio collage of the poems in the Downtown Terminal.

Artist Statement
The rich visual narratives shaped from the barest of essentials in Japanese Haiku and Félix Fénéon’s Novels in Three Lines are the inspiration for this series. Haiku’s seventeen morae and Fénéon’s three lines are sparse, evocative, and visually precise texts ripe with humor, sorrow, longing, and reflection. Each bus chronicle is a voyeuristic contemplation on isolation within a crowd; the mundane moments of reverie; and on the gender, ethnicity, age, disability, and class dynamics enveloped within the complex choreography between arrival and departure. This practice of everyday life is revealed in slender poetic gestures. The date, time, and geographic position are notated in order to demarcate the locus of a fleeting experience. A passenger’s physical characteristics, posture, clothing, personal artifacts, and actions while situated within the spatial constraints of the bus become the fertile ground on which to create the chronicles. Although based on actual observations each fictional narrative contemplates the routine and the deviant, the ethereal and the grounded, the known and the unknown woven into an intricate tapestry of movement, connection, and memory.

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