Tuesday, September 6, 2011

Take Me To Paradise - Performance Art

 From: http://www.aestheticsnow.com/detailpage.php?id=109
 Acting Up  -  Performance art - At The Vanishing Point
Growing out of the avante-garde and conceptual art of the 1960s, performance in visual art – performance art - now more-than-ever is being utilised by artists in communicating and developing their ideas across a number of mediums, platforms and places.

Performance based and inspired visual art stretches across the gamut of emotions, sensations and affect. From the intimate, to the gestural, the manic to the meditative, it can take place anywhere, anytime - lasting seconds, minutes, hours, days, months, and sometimes even years.

From the artist as performer, to the audience as performer, performance based and performance inspired contemporary visual artoften challenges audiences to think in new and unconventional ways about art, self, culture and the world around them.

actingUP offers a diverse smorgasbord of performance treats; from the live to the documentary, the abject to the interactive, the critical to the comedic. Featuring 15 local, interstate and international individual and collaborative artists, the performance based and inspired art of actingUP draws upon such disciplines as sound art, theatre, painting, drawing, video, documentary, photography, and, critical & conceptual discourses.

List of Artists:
Alexandra Unger (UK), Ana Nusdorfer Carter, Cuntstruct (VIC), Goran Tomic, Hayley Hill, Irnin Khan, Jan Cornall, Jeffrey Hamilton,mark dahl (CAN), Marya Elimelakh, Michelle Cox, Pineapple Park, SandS through the hourglass, Susannah Williams, The Academy of Emergency Art - Sydney.
 …………………………………………………………………………………………………………………
 In Performing the Wedding Dress – a documentary of photographic prints - London artist, Alexandra Unger, rips her insides out, disrupting perceived feminine purity whilst dressed in a fashioned wedding-dress chosen from a series of idealised drawings created as a child.

Ana Nusdorfer Carter’s Pieces of Me, is an attempt by the artist to procure personal items from the audience on opening night. Using the donated items, Carter, the self-described liberator, creates her own mixed-media self-portrait, pushing the boundaries of possession and ownership.

In Fish and Milk & Blood – performance based video and photography - Melbourne collaborative duo Cunstruct (Zinzi Kennedy & Gina Clifford), reference 1960s & 1970s performance art (Valie Export and Carolee Schneeman) to explore corporeality and the abject possibilities of the female body.

Goran Tomic
returns to the stage of ATVP with the debut performance of K(no)w Self Here, an epic struggle of the inner and outer, the psychological and the physical. A body trapped within the confines of space and time as webs weave around and through the tactile and the visceral.

Hayley Hill’s video Two Young Men on the Threshold of Great Achievement juxtaposes the contemporary and the historic through the changing notions of masculinity and gender expectations. How do the mythologies and heroism of bushrangers and explorers play-out in the performance of contemporary male Australian culture?

In You Are A Mimic - a series of tragically comedic performance videos, Irnin Khan explores contemporary pop culture through the lens of the domestically mundane. The artist performs acts of nostalgic-pop-appropriation in a journey of self-reflective suburban discovery.

Jan Cornall’s Take Me To Paradise builds an interactive performance, deconstructing the literary novel of the same title, authored by the artist. Cornall disassembles the novel and invites the audience to piece it back together in any configuration they wish - a collage of improvisation and chance - creating a new shared narrative, which the artist recites and critiques.

Using found objects and a guerrilla sensibility; Jeffrey Hamilton creates abstracted murals referencing site and streetscape. ForactingUP Hamilton puts his marks on an ATVP courtyard mural in front of the opening night audience. The audience is provided its own chance to do likewise by adding to Like Share, a text mural penned by actingUP curator, Brendan Penzer.

Vancouver based Canadian performance and conceptual artist mark dahl presents a series of critical and satirical documentary performance prints. One can not only see the results of the artist hiding behind an institution, but physically – perhaps imaginarily or metaphorically – moving such an institution, or not!

Russian born Marya Elimelakh’s video, documentation of the performance Russia 1917-2009, sees the artist stomach a shot of vodka for each and every political regime over the past 90 years. Toasting in mimicry and critical analysis of the perceived blind faith that her native born society celebrates on the occasions of new hegemony ascendency, Elimelakh attains the level of physical sickness matched by that which is personally felt toward such celebrations.

Michelle Cox appropriates herself and illustrations from the 1970’s book The Woman’s Own Book of Modern Homemaking via animation in House of Valium. The artist creates veritable robotically inspired phantom limbs to enact the repetitive actions of domestic house cleaning in an environment of kitsch, with a twist.

In Sine, collaborative duo – Pinapple Park (Adrian Clement and James Gatt) – subvert and deconstruct elements and experience of sound art and performance. The pair - of all things yellow - strip the musical act down to its skeletal form as they subject themselves to an enduring 350Hz sine wave in an exploration of aural phenomenology.

Sands through the hourglass, one of Sydney’s most terrorisingly exciting duo improvisation acts, introduce a site and context specific performance for actingUP and its audience. Utilising notions of dream, the invisible and the visible, whilst straddling the sublime and the sadistic, the collaborators interrogate notions of the spectator in an opening night spectacle.

Susannah Williams takes the art and techniques of drawing to the nth degree with site specific installations constructed live onto gallery walls. Using string and LED lighting, the artist creates large-scale drawings that are three-dimensional and visually arresting, laying bare the processes of a unique drawing practice.

Last, but certainly not least, actingUP introduces The Academy of Emergency Art Sydney (represented by Nicole Dennis and Saha-Mayousha Jones), the Australian collective of the growing worldwide phenomenon of Thierry Geoffroy’s (Denmark) Emergency Rooms. Microemergency presents video documentation of previous Critical Run actions, the perpetual Emergency Dictionary,and, the Australian debut of Slow Dance, an audience interactive dance of live critical discussion generated by the topics of the newspaper of the day.



 (c) ATVP

No comments:

Post a Comment