Inside century-old State Street building, what artist Benton Bainbridge is filling it with

Erie native Benton Bainbridge is a media artist whose work has been shown at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History in Washington D.C., Auditorium Parco della Musica in Rome, Italy, Fundación Juan March in Madrid, Spain and more.

Now, he's bringing his media art expertise to downtown Erie in the form of his FEED Media Art Center at 1307 State St.

The National Endowment for the Arts defines media art as all genres and forms that use electronic media, film and technology as an artistic medium. This includes projects presented via film, television, radio, audio, video, the Internet, interactive and mobile technologies, video games, immersive and multi-platform storytelling and satellite streaming.

Bainbridge, 56, describes FEED as a center that "supports the creation, exhibition, teaching, preservation and innovation of media art."

"It could include sound art, interactive forms of art or other forms that are maybe used for programming or systems of equipment to create responsive, generative, immersive media," he said. "So, that’s the goal here; to always keep the space as flexible as possible."

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There's no place like home

Before he created FEED, he was only looking for a space where he could store equipment from past art installations.

After looking in The Bronx, New York — where he's currently still an artist-in-residence at the Andrew Freedman Home — Bainbridge turned his search to Pennsylvania.

"I did a Zillow search of all the properties in Pennsylvania $10,000 and under and I found a building in Meadville," he said. "It was amazing and had many advantages. Then I thought to myself ... But Meadville? I’ve only been to Meadville a couple times in my life, so I thought I’d look at Erie."

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Orginially, Bainbridge left Erie in 1984, but returned to visit family every year. He didn't find a building in Erie for $10,000, but 1307 State St. caught his eye.

"When I saw this space, I fell in love with it," Bainbridge said. "I was like, 'This seems crazy', but more or less the people who looked at it with me said, 'It is crazy, but you’d be crazy not to do it.'"

"This is a lot more space than I need to store my TVs, so that’s what led to me thinking, 'Let’s do it. Let’s try to make it happen and open it up to other artists because it’s enough space to do so."

Space once housed Epp's Furniture Company

The building — which once housed Epp's Furniture Company — has five stories with nearly 50,000 square feet of floor space, not including the basement.

Bainbridge has been working in tandem with Rob Shearer III, owner of Shearer and Son Contracting Services, and his team, who started work on the building in January.

"It was dirty and filthy, floors were all covered with a thick layer of glued-down carpet," Shearer said. "The more and more we clean it up and shifted from the walls to the floors, it’s like it unearthed all this beautiful problem for us to solve."

As Shearer and his team restore the building, plans for each space continue to change.

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Bainbridge recognizes that building plans will need to be realistic, but he's keeping his options open to all of the possibilities the spaces can provide.

"There’s so much beauty here and so much opportunity to make art, that I will feel bad if we don’t take advantage of something, even if it has to change for any practical reason," Bainbridge said. "It’ll reach a plateau of evolution and we’ll enjoy it until the next stage of evolution."

The plan for FEED Media Art Center

Even as plans change, Bainbridge still has an overall vision for each floor of FEED.

He hopes the first floor at the State Street level will serve as a public exhibition space.

"The space will forever be changing and evolving," he said. "Today maybe we want to put a projection that fills this whole wall, but tomorrow we’re going to want a video sculpture made out of TVs that I’ve salvaged from the streets of Erie, PA."

The second floor will also be open to the public, but Bainbridge expects it'll mostly function as a space where artists-in-residence will work.

"Some of the technology we need to do what we want to do will be in here, but most of this space we’re going to try to keep it available for creating and showing art," Bainbridge said.

The third floor is still up for a lot of interpretation, but Shearer has plans to raise the roof by utilizing what he anticipates will be a new type of construction technology.

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"At the end of the day, the high concept would be to raise the roof, put a roof over a roof, dry it in and selectively remove the interior so we have a 24-foot clear ceiling height on the third floor on State Street, which is pretty unique."

The backside of the third floor, as well as the fourth and fifth floors, will potentially serve as private spaces for Bainbridge in FEED.

Aside from storage space, the back half of the third floor is expected to become a temporary living area for visiting artists.

"Say it’s going to take an artist two weeks to create an installation and then exhibit it for 30 days," Shearer said. "They would have a place to stay while they’re putting that thing out. It’s a cool challenge because we’re introducing something that’s not multi-family housing or an apartment, but that congregate living into an otherwise commercial setting."

The fourth floor will become an archival space, housing all the media art that's made at FEED.

Finally, the fifth-floor loft space, which is about 61 feet above Commerce Street, is expected to become Bainbridge's future home. It boasts several bricked-in windows, which Shearer hopes to restore to create a wall of glass.

Involving the community

FEED Media Art Center won't be complete for several years. Until then, Bainbridge has transformed the building's garage on Commerce Street into a pop-up exhibition space for artists and the public to get involved now.

"It is important to understand there’s a limit to how much we can do quite yet," Bainbridge said.

Bainbridge held a soft opening of FEED in its garage at the beginning of August, where he showcased media art from artists in the Erie region and around the world.

Bainbridge stressed that FEED will be a center specifically for media art. Erie is home to a number of creative spaces, like The 1020 Collective, Performing Artists Collective Alliance (PACA), Erie Center for Arts and Technology (ECAT) and more. But Bainbridge's goal is to create a whole new space dedicated to the media arts, an endeavor he believes Erie can support.

"We've long been a destination, though us locals often like to poke fun at our town," he said. "Nonetheless, there's a pride in this place that's contagious. We are reaching a critical mass where there's enough culture going on that people will come back during the cold months to take advantage of all the culture we have to offer."

Bainbridge hopes his center will help people to better understand and appreciate media art.

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"Those of us in our mid-20s and older emerged from an underground global movement that had to incubate for a half-century before gaining wide appreciation," he said. "Media artists enjoy membership in this worldwide community. There are many more of us who will be glad to meet Erieites and share their art and knowledge."

Baylee DeMuth can be reached at 814-450-3425 or bdemuth@timesnews.com. Follow her on Twitter @BayleeDeMuth.

This article originally appeared on Erie Times-News: FEED Media Art Center on State Street to house residencies, exhibits