Boxing with Szilard Gaspar
Zorzini Gallery at Volta Art Fair, NYC, March 1, 2017 By Alexandra Hammond As a steady stream of people breezed through the long corridors of the Volta Art fair at Pier 90, concentration gathered at booth F01, occupied by Zorzini Gallery of Bucharest, Romania. A slender young man, Romanian artist Szilard Gaspar, with the face of a saint from a Spanish Golden Age painting, arrived in the booth, seated himself and began changing his shoes and taping his hands. His preparations were executed with the specificity of a trained athlete. The intimacy of these actions was heightened by the art fair setting, where everyone’s gaze is trained to the external world of images, objects, opportunities for social networking, sales. The spectacle of the person changing from one activity to another, dressing and undressing, took on the importance that Mr. Rogers so aptly demonstrated in his children's show, where the ritual of the daily change of clothes, from outdoor jacket to cardigan, dress shoes to sneakers became a stabilizing routine and a marker of a boundary from one place and one kind of activity to the next. It was not so much a necessity, that the new activity could not be performed or inhabited without the wardrobe change, as a decision to enter a new mode of operation.
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Maybe it's the warmer weather, maybe it's the temporary escapism but we are really looking forward to New York Armory Week. Several art fairs have upped their performance art programming and some, well, we just can't seem to get any information from... thus is art week. So here it is, our top NY Armory Week 2017 performance art picks. Hope to see you around!
Next week NYC kicks off Armory Week. Thus far, only a few fairs have promoted performance art as a part of their programming (sigh). With the break of Fountain Art Fair from Armory Week this year, performance art viewing possibilities are noticeably lean.
I am delighted to report however that SPRING/BREAK ART SHOW will present performance art programming throughout the duration of Armory Week thanks to the curatorial selections of AKArt in an exhibition titled, Transgressive Inversions + Identities. The multi-media exhibition will feature works by 7 artists including live performances by KATYA GROKHOVSKY and UJIN LEE. I have always deemed Katya an entertaining, relevant and critical performance artist. This is a wonderful opportunity to view her live works.
According to the press release, Grokhovsky will engage with exhibition attendees during 'Slow Dance', a participatory, live, durational performance-intervention — and 'Status Update', a durational action-intervention, in which digital social media status updates are transported into physical reality via acrylic-on-canvas banners. Lee will present 'Small Rotunda' a participatory, site-specific performance during which Lee fills the exhibition space with a common household item bojagi—traditional cloths collected from Lee’s hometown of Seoul, South Korea, used for wrapping and transporting goods from time immemorial.
PERFORMANCE SCHEDULE Rooms 4024-4026 Katya Grokhovsky Tuesday, March 3, 5-8pm Wednesday, March 4, 5-7pm (Status Update) Thursday, March 5, 4-7pm (Slow Dance) Saturday, March 7, 4-7pm (Status Update) Sunday, March 8, 3-6pm (Slow Dance) Ujin Lee Tuesday, March 3, 1-5pm Saturday, March 7, 12-4pm |
CONTRIBUTORSIan Deleón Archives
July 2023
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