Artist Statements (continued)

A Private Seduction by Eddie Gamboa

This piece uses the obstructed vision of the audience to prompt their imaginative engagement in an act of
public sex. Challenging a representative model which allows for audiences to generalize from an experience
they only partially view, this performance encourages the audience to compete for the right to see, all the while
making them increasingly visible to the world outside of the performance space.

Happy Birthday Mr. President by Didier Morelli

I did not have sexual relations with that woman [].-President Bill Clinton, January 26th, 1998.
If a picture is said to be worth a thousand wordswhat value does it have when all of the lights have been
turned off and no one can see it? Happy Birthday Mr. President, a six-minute-and-fifty-two-second long
performance, is an exploration of the precariousness and power of a sequence of live images engaging with
a confluence of historical events on the day of the performance. Interested in the dependence of the human
visual apparatus (i.e. the eye) on light and lighting to ascertain, engage, and consume an image properly,
the performance uses a chiaroscuro technique in order to create an unstable viewing environment. As the
performative action is revealed using an unsteady and unpredictable light source, the audience observes the
spectacle in flashes of temporary brightness while continuously running the risk of falling back into the obscurity
of an unlit room.
The performances content is fueled by the force of the images that exist in our collective memory, the highly
meditated and mythologized cases of secret sexual affairs lead by both American Presidents John F. Kennedy
(1917-1963) and Bill Clinton (b. 1946). Playing with fire, these Presidents conducted politics in the oval office
under daylight and performed extramarital sexual promiscuities in the darkness of adjacent rooms. In both
cases, proper public political images clash with private bedroom images creating a frenzied spectacle when the
realities of both image-worlds collide. As late Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau (1919-2000) once
said We have no business in our nations bedrooms, and he understood how to manipulate images, obscurity,
and the theatrics of the political stage.

PERIPHERAL
VISIONS

Assembly by A.C. Leone

Animals and machines are often, by our interpretation, categorized into polarized categories of threat and ally.
Complex machines and innovations used for craft are labeled by descriptors that either a) interpret their functions
as helpful, their form as artful, and their utility as benign and nonthreatening or b) weaponize their utility, ascribe
fear narratives to their presence, and highlight the dangerous, systematic nature of their components. With
non-human animals, a human-centric relational understanding also categorizes the other as beasts of the wild
or innocent wildlife, predator or prey, based upon the physical threat they might pose to a human species, the
carnivorous nature of an animals food consumption, and the anatomical composition of their physique.
In my piece, Assembly, I seek to draw focus to certain visual cues of machine and animal aesthetic that ascribe
predatory and weaponized (or, inversely, prey and instrumental) characteristics to machines-and-animals-asobjects. I ask the audience to explore the affective relationship that they hold with these visual markers, and
the emotional attachment and response that is created in our active observation of particular traits. The pieces
title draws attention to both assembly as a descriptor of congregated living bodies, and a term for the task of
compiling parts of a complex machine into a single functioning unit.

Intolerable Ugliness by Liz Laurie

How do we rely on sight and visual information to make assumptions about gender? One of the ways is through
our apprehension of fashion. Clothing, accessories, and certain poses carry culturally determined connotations
of femininity or masculinity. This link between fashion and gender can be both arbitrary and fluid. The high heel,
for example, is now considered a symbol of traditional femininity, but it was originally developed for soldiers
who fought on horseback and needed to stand in stirrups. Later it became an overt display of masculinity for the
fashionable man of 17th century France, including King Louis XIV of France. Borrowed by women who wanted
to appear more masculine, the high heel gradually began to visually connote femininity rather than masculinity.
Today, we associate men in heels with drag queens or with a blurring of the lines between femininity and
masculinity present in more cutting edge fashion.
My piece concentrates on the question of masculinity and how it is constructed through fashion. Symbols
of mainstream masculinity are juxtaposed with fashion trends that have outlived their connotations of
masculinity, in order to ask questions about how we understand gender visually. Can a shoe be inherently
masculine? Feminine? How do we decide which shoe is feminine and which is masculine? And how do we
respond to images that fail to present a conventional masculinity? What information do we take in through
our sight and how do we catalogue gender from visual information? Oscar Wilde called fashion a form of
ugliness so intolerable that it needed to be changed every six months. Do the vagaries of fashion change our
understanding of how gender is performed?

Performance sensorium
Monday, January 26, 2015

Artist Statements (in order of performance)

Artist Statements (continued)

A Parody of the Work of Time by Grace Overbeke

In The Meantime by Jonathan Magat

In 2012, Merrill Lynch released faceretirement.com, an online application to encourage consumers between 18
and 29 years old to invest in 401K and other retirement accounts. The app showed predicted increases in costs
of living and provided potential investors with a computer-generated image of their face in 50+ years. The apps
creators cited Stanford Universitys research showing that visual encounters with virtual avatars will impact
peoples behavior in the actual world.

chronic adjective \kr-nik\

medical : continuing or occurring again and again for a long time
: happening or existing frequently or most of the time
: always or often doing something specified

The FaceRetirement app can be understood as a way of expanding the viewers identity by allowing hir to
identify with an older person, as well as to expand hir reality by using the power of image to feel a sense of
possession of (and, literally, investment in) the future.
I am interested in ways art can be used to collapse boundaries between populations. If image determines
identity, and identity determines affinity, then is it not plausible that image can be a very powerful tool in
broadening the identity-groups with whom a spectator feels with whom a spectator feels affiliated? Can artists
use the expanded identity created by simulation to prompt the same emotional investment that Merrill Lynch
has garnered financially?
To address this question, I will transform the studio space a gallery of interactive portraits which use a technology
similar to that of the FaceRetirement app. My hope is that these portraits will destabilize our sense of trust in
vision, while at the same time open us up to a wider vision of the self.

In Chapter Nine of Practices of Looking, Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright (vis--vis Michel Foucault) map out
the intimate relationship between science and visualityspecifically, how sight has become a privileged domain
for the construction of objective scientific knowledge. Think the Leiden Anatomy Theater in 1610. Think CT
scans, MRIs, X-Rays: they are commonly understood to help us see the unseen.
Continuing this emphasis on vision/sight, in their hit book Getting Well Again written for patients with lifethreatening illnesses, O. Carl Simonton, Stephanie Matthews-Simonton, and James L. Creighton (1978) write
about visualization and mental imagery techniques as ways of improving recovery and prognosis. This is all
fascinating stuff. And yet.
In this performanceusing repetition, gesture, movement, and objectsI explore various modes of interplay
among chronic illness, time, and vision/sight.
How does the domain of the visual, in which to see is to know, permeate the ways in which ideas around
illness are brought into being?

[INVISIBLE] by Elizabeth Hunter

Or, how might the chronically ill bodyor the subject inhabiting the chronically ill bodyserve as an animating
site/sight through which to apprehend and disrupt normative notions of illness, time, and vision?

[INVISIBLE] exposes the broader social implications of a video game culture that relies on disembodied and
solitary visual dominance. By removing the distraction of auditory input from the visual effects of vertigo,
disorientation, depth perception, and awareness in fast-paced first-person perspective games, I juxtapose
the variation in individual perspective with the bodily co-presence of multiple spectators witnessing an activity
traditionally defined by physical isolation from other participating bodies. Though multiple interactors regularly
experience a simultaneous virtual reality in video game culture, particularly within Massively Multiplayer Online
Role Playing Games, these MMORPGs and the larger video game culture are built on a separation of the
performed virtual self, as avatar, from the physical realities and limitations of each players meatspace body.

Or, for the subject inhabiting the chronically ill body, at what points does vision begin, end, or cease to exist?

[INVISIBLE] also interrogates the misogyny and rape culture embedded in the video game industry, a value
system most obvious in the anatomical impossibility with which most female characters are drawn. By inscribing
audience directives on my own body, thereby transforming flesh into flawed Graphical User Interface (GUI), I
utilize my physical imperfections as a critique of the hyper-sexualized simulacra of female video game characters.
Similarly, [INVISIBLE] illustrates how the mechanics of seeing employed by the on-screen self presumes a
homogeneity of perception that does not exist in the non-virtual world. To that end, [INVISIBLE] blurs the formal
temporal boundaries of the performance event, with a full experience of the piece hinging on the presence and
vision of other viewers physical bodies.

The Unifying Divide of Being Black, Having Character,

and Appearing Personable by Bonnie Bright
Ragtime dance was not just a form of expression of the body through space but was also the embodiment of
contemporaneous negotiations regarding race, gender, sexuality, religion, morality, generation, and class George-Graves, 2009
This piece explores the collaborative process of performer, narrator and spectator through the development
of early 20th century Ragtime animal social dances. This piece is draped over Debords The Society of the
Spectacle. The spectacle is a social relationship between people that is mediated by images of what is and
is not appropriate in public spaces. Animal dances, first appearing in descriptions of slave plantation dances
and continuing into Ragtime era African American dance of 1910, imitated the movement of animals through
dance techniques rooted in African traditions and ideologies of animals as metaphors for survival and strength.
The spectacle of Black dance is funneled through Gramscis emphases on the influence of language on
hegemony, to become Debords representational image of undesirable yet comedic primitive dancing. Ragtime
is then refined, removing the twisting, shaking, wiggling, and flaunting, to be appropriately marketed as a fun
and iconic dance for the audience of white ballroom dance spaces. In so doing, Ragtime transforms from an
improvised socially expressive dance to a commodified charter dance that is simply performed. What happens
when the spectacle is revolutionized in Debords structure: removing the commodity fetishism by reassigning
the role of spectator to co-performative witness who is required to engage with the dance producer for insight,
instead of speculate on the produced image.

Or, how is chronicity lived, experienced, sensed?

A Peak into a Sticky Sink by Kelly Chung

In the late 1800s, James Phelan, the mayor of San Francisco, implemented intensive sanitation policies that
medically regulated and monitored Chinatown residents and businesses to prevent the spread of rabies and the
bubonic plague. This short performance explores how these sanitation policies and other similar discourses
have historically and continuously marked Chinese bodies as filthy and contagious. A Peak into a Sticky Sink
investigates how although these depictions have increasingly slipped away in the current moment, associations
with disease still stick on Chinese bodies. By playing with the slipping and sticking of rice on my body, A Peak
into a Sticky Sink aims to question what slips and sticks on our own bodies and the bodies of others. I also
attend to how spaces are also racially partitioned off. While sitting on the peripheries of Chinatown, audience
members will contend with their own gaze that peaks upon a racialized subject who arrives at a sink to sanitize
herself. This performance asks: how do we can see disease on a racialized body? How do racialized bodies
begin to see and experience this disease as their own? This performance invites visual engagement to inquire
how we see ourselves relationally to others and how we look at racialized bodies.

Panoptical Bodies by Amy Swanson

Michel Foucaults theory of panopticism refers to political technologies that mirror Benthams panopticon:
an architectural figure in which a supervisor at the center surveils his subjects who cannot see him nor one
another. Modern dictatorships are a present-day example of panoptical political systems. Dictators inflict
repressive surveillance technologies on their subjects who are conscious of being watched, disempowered, and
forced to look away from the atrocities committed by the state. A recent attempted coup dtat on December 30,
2014 in the Gambia, a tiny West African country nearly entirely surrounded by Senegal, brought the country and
its largely unknown dictator, Yahya Jammeh, into international attention. Jammeh, who came to power in 1994
through a military coup and has ruled ever since, subjects Gambians to living conditions in which freedom of all
kinds is severely limited and devastating violence may occur unprovoked at any given moment. Influenced by
recent media attention afforded to the Gambia and Jammehs politics, this piece asks how bodies themselves
respond to such conditions. I examine the bodily effects of knowing one is being watched while not able to
see, exclusion, and disempowerment. The movement is generated by both images of peoples living under
totalitarian regimes and an exploration into my kinaesthetic response to obstructed vision and isolation. I hope
to provoke reflection on the ways in which ideology and political systems inscribe themselves onto bodies and
become visible in certain postures, gestures, and facial expressions.