cracks in the pavement

In attempt to quell the activity slump Sam & I have fallen into lately, I stumbled across an extremely interesting art installation/scavenger hunt/event while exploring the chron for stuff to do around town. A handful of artists placed several hundred small, environmentally inspired works around the city with maps and clues on a website leading to them. We set out after I finished my night shift on Sunday morning with a packet of maps and photo-clues that I'd printed off of the site and wandered around the city and quickly found two really cool embroidered portraits by heather johnson hidden along the interstate and near the old airport. We were so excited that our first two tries out of the gate were successes that we weren't deterred from the adventure after several hours of wondering around various verdant parks, trying to find pieces for which the only clues were a completely ordinary looking trees. Perhaps neither one of us have the artist's (or forest ranger's) eye for distinguishing individual trees from one another, but needless to say, we didn't have much luck. An amusing swing through east austin earned us a bitchin' piece by Jake Borndal following a pleasant run-in with the cats over at fish-r-us. Bolstered by that achievement, we continued on and only decided to give up the hunt after spending two hours trapsing around mopac overpasses with no luck.
All in all it was a great time. Its a brilliant way to get people up and out and to really explore parts of their city that they would probably otherwise never come in contact with. I didn't even mind the missed clues, the neck strain, and time spent inspecting every freakin' tree in the park with exacting care only to come up with nullity because even when we didn't find anything, we found something. *love, r.








update:Heather Johnson, the artist behind the two embroidered pieces we found, in turn found the calling cards we left behind and linked to this site from her own. Also, KUT 90.5fm ran a piece on the project this morning: listen.