Ali Osborn
Ali Osborn is a resident printer at Bowne Printers at 209 Water Street in Manhattan. Dating back to 1775, the shop prints everything from wood types, blocks and plates to cards, posters and invitations. Since 2015, Osborn has been an MFA Candidate in Visual Arts Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey. He received his BA (Studio Art Major) from Wesleyan University in Middletown, CT.
Frontier Fellow Ali Osborn possibly at Fossil Point. Photo by Maria Sykes.
"Where is Fossil Point?!"
Two Sundays ago Jack Forinash, Maria Sykes, David Gordon (Jack's Isuzu Trooper), and I went in search of Fossil Point, a Jurassic outcropping to the south. We followed seemingly detailed directions - “just after Horse Bench Reservoir, take a left” “go through the mud wash" “look for the flat parking area to your left”. The first place we parked and explored was not, in fact Fossil Point, but the layer cake (Jack calls it lasagne) of striations was worth the trip. Jack climbed to the highest point while Maria and I meandered among the crumbling boulders. I sat on a wide sloping rock and drew. Jack returned and reported that he found the “flat parking area.” We climbed back in David Gordon and drove around the bend to see some fossils. “Explore the boulders. As a starting point there are some large vertebrae at ground level.” We did this, used some imagination…and we think we may have potentially found one gigantic vertebrae buried in a rock. It’s hard to know because aren’t fossils rocks too? On the drive home we located some more prominent landmarks that we decided should be part of the directions. Like “Take a left at the monster Toblerone slice!”
By the end of his Fellowship, Ali had created prints, a big drawing, small drawings, and a 1959 Boniva Travel Trailer that was converted for the day into a listening-cabin/help-yourself-coffee-shop. Inside the trailer there was also an amplified collage of sounds that he recorded over his four weeks in Utah (and a couple days in Colorado). After the installation, the sound recordings lived online paired with still images:
