In Performance: “Approach” at Lexington Art League (Kentucky, USA)

Approach: October 20 – November 25, 2012

http://www.lexingtonartleague.org/

Approach is an exhibition exploring situations of separateness and/or the search for harmony as a theme in performance art. Works in this show will focus on engagement with self, the audience and/or the surrounding environment and will exist within the genre of performance art, or video or photographic documentation of performative actions/works.

Curated by Rae Goodwin:

“Normal or systematic can become a constricting device of the, sometimes, concealed paradigm that is an everyday routine. The systemic (systematic) ways in which we live our lives can be interrupted by the approach of others. To come towards, move away, to allow the dance of interchangeability, the influence of another, the influence of our inner dialog, is to change, is to affect and be affected. Words, gestures, silences, glances, screams all inform or define the text and subtext of life. Performance work can belie, shore up, reveal and distort this conversation of the everyday…and therefore alter the perception of normal.

We approach our selves and one another in many different ways throughout our lives. As performance art uses the body as subject it also uses the lives of the viewer as fodder for reflection upon, in the viewing. The work in the exhibition explores notions of trust, belief, rules, language, relationship and the rich ground between an interior and exterior dialog.

It is my hope, that while experiencing this grouping of work, both live performance and documentation of performance, the viewer will have an empathetic response to the artists presented in the work. If empathy is achieved this response can allow the viewer to enter a dialog with themselves and with other. This dialog is the approach, the whole of the art experience, and if we succeed as artists, it can create diverse, layered and complex understandings of meaning, as can any conversation within one’s self or with another.

Approach is an exhibition exploring situations of separateness and/or the search for harmony. Works in this show focus on engagement with self, the audience and the surrounding environment and exist within the genre of performance art, or video or photographic documentation of performative works. In LIVE, Art and Performance, Marina Abramovic says “Feelings and emotional states have to be transformed in public without anything in between. But the public have to come to this state ready…” So come to the work ready to have a conversation about harmony and separateness, to be transformed, to be approached.”