Shayna Blum

Bio

Shayna T. Blum is a Master of Fine Art candidate in Design and Technology at the San Francisco Art Institute. Blum received her Bachelor of Fine Art in Painting at Lyme Academy College of Fine Art in 2001 and her Post Baccalaureate in Text and Image Arts at the School of the Museum of Fine Art, Boston in 2006. Blum has exhibited throughout the states and abroad. She is a post studio practice artist whose work crosses disciplines in multi media/text and image.

Statement

I met the guy who called himself Gershom one Sunday morning in June, on the street in New York City. It was 6:30 am and I was awake, outside my hotel, conducting my morning ritual of drinking coffee and smoking a cigarette. I had been in the city since Thursday and was video taping the street from the same location, at the same time each day. I witnessed the early morning rush, which I was grateful not to be a part of. Sunday was not as busy as the other days.

Calling Gershom a character is an understatement. He is a 36-year-old male who sells bags on Canal Street for a living. Gershom was born in the Dominican Republic to a Palestinian father and Dominican mother. He was raised in Los Angeles and currently resides in the New York vicinity. Gershom has interesting ideas when it comes to religion. He was raised catholic, but converted to Islam later in life. When I met Gershom, he had been partying all night and was still active like the energizer bunny. He wanted to hang out and talk. And he did... talk and talk and talk and talk. We sat for a while and I asked him questions about who he is and where he's from. We discussed art, religion, politics, and popular culture issues such as sex and drugs.

In the video, Gershom and I are interacting and communicating in dialogue. Our conversation is heard throughout the piece, however our physical presence is not. The viewer is shown a video that does not visually focus on the subjects, but rather exhibits the environment in which the subjects are participants. Gershom and I sit, chat, walk on the street, stop at Duane Read, and hang outside Starbucks waiting for it to open. The video is an hour-long documentation of an interview in which I, as an artist, engage a stranger in conversation to learn about them, their life, and their experiences. Of course, whether or not the information collected is true or false is another issue.