Homeglen School of One

The Homeglen School of One Global Art Project is a collaborative and interactive visual archive comprised of anonymous narratives and imaginative images that chart the travels of diminutive carvings. The novel historical records found throughout the diverse digital landscape of this continually expanding e-space are shaped by personal experiences, an appreciation of local surroundings and culture, as well as the vocational trajectories and educational journeys of contributors. Since its formal inception in Fall 2014, collaborators in this project have documented and recalled their travels to places in and around Edmonton, throughout Alberta, Africa, Asia, Eurasia, Europe, the Caribbean, the Americas, Oceania, and Canada coast-to-coast and destinations far North.

The diverse locales and experiences recalled in the Global Art Project confirm that it was originally directed towards recognizing, buttressing, and fomenting links between the City of Edmonton and Worldwide communities. As it unfolded, however, a substantial component of this collective endeavour became intimately linked to an innovative literacy and cultural awareness program called Carving Vignettes. This associate program is intended to help provide opportunities, to challenge tiresome stereotypes and inequities, and to generate equal treatment for the narratives and perspectives offered by contributors. While the vignettes are constructed according to some well-worn rhetorical techniques and leading contemporary communication strategies, the works still constitute a new form of historical record. Furthermore, the Homeglen School of One Global Art Project is deeply committed to the promotion of multidisciplinary scholarship, advanced deliberative research techniques, and excellence in Public History, especially within the realm of what leading Mexican neuroscientists might define as “the pathways of memory,” (rastros de la memoria). E-tourists who visit this site will recognize the value of combining object, image and text for thoughtful recollection and cognitive expeditions towards an appreciation of difference.

The Global Art Project encompasses two overarching, straightforward categories of activity, both of which are linked further to three overlapping layers or types of participation. One form of activity is undertaken by collaborating contributors while another embraces reading viewers engaged in turismo electrónico. The images reading viewers encounter on the main page of the Global Art Project reveal how anonymous collaborating contributors have taken pictures of various pieces in a wide array of venues during their travels as a relatively easy, fundamental form of participation. These photographs are part of an increasingly large pool of images and will be rotated by the Homeglen School of One every few months during the lifetime of this project. Meanwhile, the activities of collaborating contributors also include the production of anonymous, individual travel accounts and group galleries that combine portraits of the carvings with narratives that follow the Carving Vignettes program.

The travel accounts and galleries demonstrate that this unique e-space harks to a model originating and marshaled frequently in the pre-Columbian Americas for the recollection of four specific historical moments in the present (2 + 2 + 1), folded together according to the rhythm of non-linear, cyclical notions of time and seasonal light. Every vignette reading viewers consider at each juncture of this archive is marked by the production time used to complete its respective carving; the time taken to write a description and title of the carving; the moment surrounding the photograph of the carving; and the final period used to pen an anonymous and gender-neutral narrative that corresponds to the portrait. Hence, the galleries and individual travel narratives that inform the Global Art Project clearly reveal the intrinsic value of routine Mesoamerican concepts for Worldwide societies in our present without the utilization of exoticism, “Orientalism,” “colonization,” or fantastic tropes regarding human sacrifice.

Send us an e-mail us at contact@homeglenschoolofone.com if you would like to become a collaborating contributor or if you have further questions about this project. Otherwise, please enjoy your visit. We hope you return.