Performance, Not Otherwise Specified

I am happy to invite you to an evening of performances that I organized and will also be participating in. Below you will find all the information. I apologize for any strange colors or other oddities in this post. I know my blog has some technical issues, but I am now in the process of moving my blog and my website over to Wordpress and hopefully that will solve the problem.

Performance: Not Otherwise Specified
Thursday June 21, 7 – 8:30 pm

Space on White
81 White Street, between Broadway and Lafayette
Space 4, lower level
(212) 227 – 8600
FREE

Inspired by the idea that what is indefinable can be both a source of anxiety as well as expansive possibility, Performance, Not Otherwise Specified presents recent works by five New York-based artists whose practices actively engage the body, experiment with space, confront comfort and pose questions to the audience.

Artists: Michele Beck & Jorge Calvo, Zach Fabri, Marie- Christine Katz, Edith Raw and Monika Weiss

Artist Bios and Projects:

Michele Beck & Jorge Calvo, Untitled #2
Dealing with themes of oppositional force, beauty and distortion, Beck and Calvo will use fabric and water to bring the body into a state of  flow and simultaneous tension. 

Michele Beck and Jorge Calvo are  interdisciplinary artist working with single channel video, installation, sound and performance. Their work has been exhibited nationally and internationally at venues including: The ICA in London, Galerie Chez Valentin in Paris, The Bronx Museum, The Queens Museum, PS122, Inport Video-Performance Festival in Estonia, LA Freewaves and the Kassler Dokumentarfilm und Videofest in Kasel, Germany. They have received grants from the Manhattan Community Arts Fund, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council and the New York Foundation for the Arts.  Michele has been granted multiple residencies at Yaddo in Saratoga Springs, New York and recently completed a residency in Cappadocia, Turkey.  Michele is currently an Associate Part Time Professor at the New School in the Department of Media Studies and Film.
http://michelebeck.net/
http://michele-jorge.blogspot.com/

 
Zach Fabri,  Sugarman Cut Across the Sky
Using the opening passage from Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon as a point of departure, I will create a composition of movement and audio with participation from the audience. Elements from the passage are transformed into banging syllables and a silent leap of flight.

  Zachary Fabri was born in Miami, Florida in 1977. In 2000, he received a Bachelor of Fine Art in graphic design in Miami at the New World School of the Arts. After moving to New York City, he received his Master of Fine Arts from Hunter College in 2007 in combine media. Focusing on video and performance, his work creates a space for discourse around social and political systems of oppression. His practice also includes photography, sculpture, drawing and installation. Often his work responds to a specific environment or context, exploring the idiosyncrasies of daily life. Zachary's work has been exhibited both nationally and internationally at Sequences Real-time Festival, Reykjavik, Iceland; Nordic Biennale: Momentum, Moss, Norway; Gallery Open, Berlin; the Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Art, New York; and the Jersey City Museum. He has recently participated in a residency and exhibition in Belo Horizonte, Brazil and a solo exhibition in Berlin, Germany. In 2011 he was awarded a Franklin Furnace Fund for Performance Art. He currently lives in Brooklyn.

Marie-Christine Katz,  Knitting …I need you
Following a thread leading to an unexpected moment in two people’s life.
Part story telling part pleading, a song of longing… Inspired by childhood memories

 Marie Christine is a Swiss born contemporary multi-media artist, living in New York City. Her study and love of theatre and the art led her to creating works using various forms of expression and materials from paper, fabric, threads, metal wire, human hair, glass and wax to text, performance and participatory art, sound photography and video. Her work has been described as an intuitive and spontaneous gesture in    reaction to a current event or a personal situation that is then further developed over time.
www.mariechristine.com
http://www.myfavoritegrandmother.com
http://letstakeawalkmc.blogspot.com

Edith Raw
Edith Raw is an interruption spectacle maker, performance and visual artist living in Brooklyn. She was selected to perform in Art In Odd Places 2008 and 2011 and the New Museum's Festival of New Ideas for the City 2011. She has studied various forms of movement including Butoh, West African, Congolese and AfroCuban dance. Most of her work combines elaborate costumes and public interaction in order to interrupt routine and interject spectacle for visual stimulus in an era dependent on technological stimulation.

Monika Weiss,  PRZYLEGANIE
PRZYLEGANIE focuses on the architectural properties of the space in which her action takes place. Exploring the intimate relationship between the body of the artist and the architectural surfaces she encounters, in her project the room becomes spatial and sonic instrument, marked and traced by trajectories of presence and absence, sound and silence.

Weiss is a visual and sound artist whose work has been exhibited in over twenty solo exhibitions and numerous group exhibitions internationally. In the words of British art critic Guy Brett, Weiss’ performative installations “provide an alternative experience of space and time, which is not end-driven but steady and enduring, establishing and deepening a human presence in the Grotowskian sense”. In 2005, Lehman College Art Gallery, CUNY, organized a survey of the artist’s work to date, Monika Weiss: Five Rivers, which was reviewed in The New York Times. In 2010 Monika Weiss-Sustenazo was presented by Centre for Contemporary Art Ujazdowski Castle, Warsaw, Poland and will be on view at Museum of Memory and Human Rights, Santiago, Chile, 2012-2013. The artist’s own writing appeared in New Realities: Being Syncretic, Springer, Wien/New York (2009) and Technoetic Arts, Intellect, London (2006). Educated first as a classical musician, Weiss continues to compose sound environments in her work. She is currently Assistant Professor at Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts at Washington University in Saint Louis. Work represented by Galerie Samuel Lallouz, Montreal. Lives and works in New York City.
http://www.streamingmuseum.org/content/monika-weiss/
http://www.lehman.edu/vpadvance/artgallery/gallery/WeissbyGuyBrett.HTM

 Image Credit: Monika Weiss “Expulsion” Concentart, Berlin, 2009
Self-shot photography. 40 volumes of Goethe's writings published in Germany in 1943, ink, water, sound composition.