“I’m mostly concerned with space and form, time can go fuck itself.” – some uncredited internet source
Ok – that’s not entirely true. I’m about to open an exhibition that is obsessed with time.
Time is my constant opponent.
My mortal enemy.
My most skilled adversary.
This exhibition, I’d rather choke than be a quitter, has been designed to investigate the intersection of time-based visual art and performance art. It includes a gallery installation of Sam Whalen’s paintings/sculpture, and a dance/sound performance I’ve directed in collaboration with sound artist Shakai Mondai and members of Plant Me Here. Whalen’s paintings inspired the creation of the live performance material, which was collaboratively scored by Shakai Mondai’s electronic soundscapes.
Time is my creative medium.
It is at the core of what I do.
But it has always eluded me. In my ongoing negotiation with it, I am usually failing. It escapes me over and over again. Somehow, in my everyday life, its course never becomes any more predictable. I compulsively hang a clock in every room of my house. It’s comforting to hear the ticking of the internal mechanism. It feels grounding to measure the immeasurable. But it’s also a tragically impossible human objective.
In order to survive on a daily basis, we must quantify time, but the rhythmic oscillations of a piece of art are immeasurable. (Ok – so there are movement notation techniques that can be employed, but the level of vibration coming from the soul of the piece cannot be measured in any reliable way. The resonance will be forever interpretable.) The vibrations have to be experienced in order to be fully understood – by the maker and the viewer.
Through time-based art, we reveal our personal mysteries. In this specific piece, it’s the feeling that there is someone else in the room when there isn’t. Or the realization that something has changed while we weren’t watching. The mind’s unsolicited suggestion of a memory. Our long-winded inventions of the future. The evolution or decay of a sequence, the suspension of a singular moment, the expedited expression of a series of events; duration is the only way I know how to manifest these things.
I am mostly trying to manipulate time into submission.
It’s a way to map out the experience of having a body – of completing a task with that body. The map is revealed by the recognition of a circumstance through repeated sequencing. This repetition is then stored in the internal memory of the piece, and it builds a narrative. It’s in the extension or the expedition of a moment.
Time reveals itself through falling apart.
Dust blows over the scene and our most human selves are revealed.
People change when we’re not paying attention.
The company we keep when we’re alone is an inexplicable landscape of dismembered parts of ourselves. Our memories and curiosities shape shift around us and in this exhibition, they materialize as monsters, lovers, reflections and companions.
The visual work warps and decays as it hangs from the walls of the gallery on the 5th floor of the 1fiftyone, a raw, unfinished Old City studio. The dancers bodies’ transform and change entirely as they perform on the 4th floor. The sound waves collide and shimmer and combust throughout the building.
Whalen’s work captures the terror of time passing. It captures growth and decay in the same moment. She creates work to be destroyed by time. Her hypochondria is ever present in the work that she generates. Her stored experiences leak into the paintings, and she allows her work to reflect them. She creates pieces with bio-hazardous materials – usually from her own body. She’s currently making new work with her own period blood. Some of the work she’ll show in this gallery has already begun to decay and organically deconstruct.
When I observe her delicately crafted creatures, they roar with an inexplicable resonance for me. They operate on the same uncanny spectrum as time-based performance. The architecture of her work shifts as it grows older, evolving naturally with time. It is subjected to elements – air, moisture, floating dirt – it is open to share particles with the viewer- the way that a dancer’s body exchanges energy with its audience. The moldy bed sheets she painted and splattered with genetically modified food more than 2 years ago will be encapsulated in the exhibition. The work vibrates with the authentic confrontation of the mortal enemy.
Is there a way to stop time? To extend the moments? To remember what felt eternal and what rushed by? Is that what Sam Whalen is doing when she embeds her hypochondriac tendencies inside her process? The rhythms in dance provide this opportunity for me. By employing the terrifying parts of ourselves, we create friction inside the circumstance of the piece itself. We become our nemesis and our ally.
Trusting the piece to reveal itself to us requires quite a bit of mystic confidence and investment in the universe. When we have that, it allows us to interpret an otherwise incoherent language.
So what is this work about? There are running themes, I suppose. But they often serve as a vehicle to investigate the desire to transform.
It’s the only way I’ve found to escape the brutality of time.
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I’d rather choke than be a quitter
1fiftyone galley + art space March 4 – 8, 2016
March 4, 7pm First Friday Opening Reception (performance at 8pm)
March 5, 7pm gallery open, 8pm performance
March 6, 4:30pm gallery open, 5:30pm performance
March 7, 4:30pm gallery open, 5:30pm performance
March 8, 7pm gallery open, 8pm performance
Open Gallery Hours:
March 5, 3pm-7pm
March 8, 3pm-7pm (Closing Reception prior to performance)