Artist: Miruna Dragan is a Romanian-American visual artist with an MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design (2001). She has attended residencies at Skowhegan, Vermont Studio Center, Art Farm, and The Banff Centre and has exhibited in the US, The Netherlands, Romania, Germany, Mexico, Greece, and Canada. She is also a member of the international artist collective Unconstrained Growth Into the Void. Her professional experience includes teaching appointments in the US, Mexico, Ghana, Austria and The Netherlands. During her residence in Holland (2003 - 2008), Dragan also engaged in assorted freelance photography, film, and graphic design projects and was PR & Production Coordinator for Amsterdam-based foundation Agentur - an international platform for contemporary artists and curators. Dragan is the newly appointed permanent faculty in Drawing at the Alberta College of Art + Design.
Description: In the fall of 2008 I attended the Comic Ray Research residency at The Banff Centre. There I created the latest installment in an on-going series of site-specific installations / interventions on golf courses entitled The Fertile Void. The Fertile Void V: The Cloud of Unknowing was installed and interacted with on a fairway of the Banff Springs Golf Club. The title for this project comes from a 14th century Christian mystical text - a handbook for the spiritual quest. Particularly inspired by the quote "let your longing relentlessly beat upon the cloud of unknowing", two hundred pentagonal balloons were loosely arranged in a cloud-like formation measuring approx. 1 x 2 x 3 meters - until the wind carried them away.
The video documentation of our actions on site was slowed to a very small percentage of the original speed, creating an ethereal and numinous sense of an otherwise straightforward footage. If the theme of this program, "crash", can be understood as a rapid collision of materials or ideas then it might be fair to say that my project functions as a type of anti-crash, depicting a protracted dispersion of material and activity into a nearly infinite space.
