Noxious Sector Projects
312 S. Washington St.
Seattle WA 98104
noxious@noxioussector.net
www.noxioussector.net/projects

Jason Tentor

Continuity in Temporal Space

The French novelist Georges Perec once attempted to "exhaust" a street corner in Paris, making lists and taking notes of everything that caught his attention over the course of a weekend. In some ways the "attempt" was a project designed to describe the perpetual motion of life on the Paris streets. In other ways it was an attempt to challenge his own creative gaze -- seeing how long and how fully he could engage with the street corner itself.

Half a world away, on a street corner in Seattle, something similar is happening. Not an attempt to exhaust a street corner but to animate it in a spirit of relational play. Every First Thursday over the last year, artist Jason Tentor has occupied the corner of 1st and Yesler, a friendly gesture that keeps life on the streets that much more interesting to the passersby. Each month Tentor stages an absurdist performance of one sort or another -- sometimes he draws stick figure portraits of people as they pass by; sometimes he hands out dollar bills for those who need some change, or bottles of water for those who are thirsty on a rainy day. Other times his set-ups are more elaborate -- an invitation to join the Tea Party, complete with a shared cup of Earl Gray or to travel through time simply by stopping to realize we are doing so. Last month Tentor simply slept, dressed in the costume of a security guard poised outside the street corner Starbucks.

These simple gestures keep a street corner changing, rupturing the everyday exhaustion of the street by proposing a new form of creative continuity. Not a continuity of perpetual motion, but one that acts out, playfully constituting a creative space that persists alongside the everyday streets of Seattle.