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Date: September 26
Times: 12 noon - 4pm
Level: All
Membership Price: $100 (Members use code MEMBERS10 at checkout to receive 10% discount)
Workshop Description:
What do you notice when you're really looking? What do you miss?
The Close Range is a full-day workshop in collective attention, using Mendocino, its coastline, its quiet edges, the things most people walk past as shared material. We begin with the body: a somatic warm-up borrowed from composer Pauline Oliveros. Then we go outside. We observe alone. We observe in pairs. We observe in small groups, each with a different way of seeing assigned.
By the end of the day, everything the group noticed gets gathered onto a single large surface: a collective map: not of geography, but of attention. What was here all along. The map is the artwork. It is made together and belongs to everyone who made it.
No art experience required. Only a willingness to slow down and look.
[ The primary artifact of the day is the Collective Map — a large-format collaborative document built by the full group during the final working session. It is not a geographic map but an attentional one: a living record of what was noticed, who noticed it, and how different roles and perspectives revealed different worlds in the same place.
Materials: kraft paper or large newsprint roll (provided), pencils, charcoal, found objects, rubbings, pressed material — whatever participants gather in the field. The map grows organically across the afternoon and is photographed at the end of the day. Each participant may take home their small group's field notes or artifacts; the collective map is a shared object.
About the Instructor: Peery Sloan is an artist in Portland, Oregon, working with whatever's at hand: clay, hair, conversation, or a patch of grass. Her practice lives in the close range: gatherings, workshops, and small acts of collective noticing that slow folks down enough to see what's usually overlooked. She calls this tending a field of regard. Rooted in rural rhythms and a lifelong pull toward slowness, her work sits at the intersection of people, land, and the overlooked infrastructures of daily life, gently asking: what if we all just looked a little closer? She serves as the program coordinator at the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture.
Required Materials: Pencils, charcoal, mark-making tools
Optional Materials: Comfortable clothes and shoes for outdoor walking, a notebook or sketchbook, curiosity about the ordinary