PERFECT JOURNEY (AFTER JAMES LEE BYARS), 2018. Comissioned by Artists Aliance Inc. in collaboriation with Bike New York. In today’s world, everything we do has to be productive and performed at an increasingly aggressive pace. Do you remember the last time you did something that didn’t make any sense? What if we take a moment for ourselves (different from yet another yoga or meditation class) to slow down, and try to see the city that we live in and its people (among them ourselves) from a different perspective? 60 years ago, “the creator of art that lived in a moment” American artist James Lee Byars hitchhiked from his hometown of Detroit to New York City, hoping to meet the renowned painter Mark Rothko, whose sublime work had made a lasting impression on Byars. Transfixed by the idea of perfection, and influenced by Zen and Noh rituals, Byars was a master of transforming abstract thought into action, shaping his persona and career into a continuous performance. Taking both artistic practice and persona of Byars as point of departure, participants in the ride collectively attempted the futile act of drawing a circle in the great geometric grid that is Manhattan. Beginning and ending at 222 Bowery, the site of Rothko’s studio in 1957 when Byars arrived in NYC, riders senselessly “circled the square” of the city’s grid—a utopic and liberating gesture that allowed the group (collectively and alone) to re-appropriated and re-defined the outline of the urban landscape. As with Byars works, a circle is not only a perfect geometrical shape that carries symbolic value, but represents what’s ephemeral and often intimate, so too, in this ride the boundaries of the urban grid softly blended into each other through the passage of the riders. At the start of the ride, each rider received a hand-made pieces of paper, on which they were asked to reflect on their experiences, thoughts, and ideas (or their lack thereof) throughout the ride. Stopping four times at pre-determined locations, riders were given the opportunity to write, draw, and respond to their experiences, which compose the collective reflections that will be turned into a small edition book. Copies of the book will be mailed to each ride participant.