figuring it out

So, for my Intermediate Art & Social Practice class, I'm doing a term-long artist residency at either the PSU Women's Resource Center or the Women's Studies Department (this remains to be seen, depending on the specific needs of my project). I haven't figured out what my project is yet. I'm starting this blog to sort of document my thought process. Hence the current title of the blog, "feeling around in the dark;" hopefully that'll be changing soon once I get things figured out.

Today, my goal is to research some feminist artists of the past and see where that takes me. I also am supposed to come up with three different tentative proposals to bring to class later today, so hopefully I'll come up with something. Right now, there are a few different areas I'm thinking about exploring: transfeminist theory and the role of trans* women within progressive third-wave feminism compared to the past, queer female/woman experience and identity (and the vast multitude of ways in which queer identity can manifest itself), or something to do with anti-oppression work/theory (the least interesting option to me, but I could tie it into another class I'm taking on the subject, which is appealing).

While I know generally what kinds of subjects I'm looking to explore with my project, I'm having trouble figuring out how I can integrate it into a social practice model since I'm coming from a primarily traditional 2D background. I feel as though the majority of artists we've looked at this term and last term viewed aesthetics as irrelevent, or at least as secondary to whatever else they were doing; most of the projects were not object-based, which I'm definitely not used to. The idea of hosting group discussions or even dinners that I could somehow collect the stories from into some kind of zine or cookbook is appealing; however, this sounds dangerously close to Lexa Walsh's dinner-and-cookbook project (I couldn't remember the name?), and I want to do something original. So... let the research begin, I suppose!