Susanne Cockrell and Ted Purves work collaboratively to create social art projects that investigate the overlay of urban and rural systems upon the lives of specific communities. Their projects ask questions about the nature of people and place as seen through social economy, history and local ecology. Their two and a half year project (2004-2007), Temescal Amity Works facilitated and documented the exchange of backyard produce, conversation, and collective biography within the Temescal Neighborhood of Oakland, CA. In the fall of 2006, Amity Works created Sonoma County Preserve as an original project for the exhibition Hybrid Fields at the Sonoma County Museum. Sonoma County Preserve was an exhibition and installation of a wide variety of home-preserved foods made by residents of Sonoma county who had grown, foraged or hunted and had preserved for future use. In their current project, Green Language: Rural Logic and Urban Practice, they are traveling to research and visit artist projects in Arctic Canada, Denmark, the Netherlands and Rumania creating a collective network, research platform, and publication series. They have received a Creative Work Fund grant from the Elise and Walter Haas Foundation, a Visual Arts grant from the Creative Capital Foundation, and support from the Oakland Office of Cultural Affairs and California College of the Arts.

Conversion Project
Susanne Cockrell and Ted Purves, in collaboration with Oliver Purves (age 6).

This project involves re-valuing the worth of personal items through conversation and exchange. To begin the project, we chose 4 items from our lives that held a certain amount of personal value and "art" value. After we choose these items, we initiated a conversation with our son Oliver about what they might be worth within his own system of value, relating their worth to things that he already has or things that he desires.

In the process of this conversation, we asked Oliver to determine some guidelines for how each of our items might be "valued". We are sending a record of this conversation in the form of photographs along with the 4 objects to the Infinite Exchange Gallery, where Jen Delos Reyes will attempt to trade them in accordance with Oliver's "value" judgements. Any items that are received in trade will be kept by our family, and documentation of the project will be sent to all participants.

Item#1: A Drawing of Two Ghosts by Oliver Purves, 2006
Description: 15" x 18", color pencils
In Exchange: something Lego, something you can take apart and build again

Item#2: Bird House by British artist Peter Liversidge,
part of a larger installation, 1997
Description: 4.5" x 4.5" x 8", cardboard
In Exchange: a new crayon box

Item#3: no..34 point d'ironie, Michel Foucault,
September 2004, director of publication, agnes b, editor Hans-Ulbrich Obrist
Description: 12" x 16", folded color artist magazine
In Exchange: a basket of candy

Item #4: ceramic work exploring use and function by
graduate student Eric Scollon, 2007
Description: 4.5" x 3", porcelain
In Exchange: an experiment set