Despite our inability to produce live events this year, we've been given an opportunity to reflect back on the incredibly daring and powerful performances presented during our Alive At Satellite events over the past 4 years. If feels like yesterday that we were trying to visualize a non-stop performance art space within an art fair. Would it actually work? It did, and it has been an incredible honor to spotlight nearly 200 artists since our first event.
The opening day of our very first Alive at Satellite event was Sean Fader's Yessss Gaga, Slay Momma! performed by local Miami drag performer, Queef Latina. Yessss Gaga, Slay Momma! featured an acapella chorus of millennial singers (and Queef Latina) streaming selfie videos with the new Sospendo hands free selfie sticks. The chorus sang for nearly 2 hours at the front entrance of Satellite, encouraging all guests to shoot their own videos and pics with the repeated phrase "Yessss Gaga, Slay Momma!" It was a comedic and jovial piece while also tapping into the cultural obsession with selfie and social media representation. Sean Fader is a photographer, performance artist and educator. We reconnected with Sean about how he's doing during the pandemic. PERFORMANCE IS ALIVE: You presented Yasssssss Gaga, Slay Momma at Satellite in 2016, have you performed this work again? SEAN FADER: Nope. PIA: Where are you currently located? SF: New Orleans, LA. USA PIA: Are you teaching during the pandemic? SF: I am teaching in person.. And it has been the beautiful marriage of a dumpster fire, train wreck, and crusty the clown. PIA: Are you currently presenting and/or preparing for future performance projects? SF: Not currently but of course yes! I had a show up (THIRST/TRAP) at Denny Dimin Gallery, June 18th - August 21st. PIA: Has the pandemic impacted your art practice? SF: Totally! My show at DDG went up and changed a ton! PIA: We recommend checking out this interview focused on Fader's recent exhibition, THIRST/TRAP.
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Performing our Reality / Dreaming our Escape - Notes from Satellite 2.0 by Alexandra Hammond1/13/2017 Performing our Reality / Dreaming our Escape - Notes from Satellite 2.0
Alexandra Hammond for Performance is Alive It’s just before the opening of Satellite 2.0 and the Parisian hotel in Miami Beach is as ready as it will ever be. Each room has been cleared of furnishings and occupied by a gallery, curatorial project, artist collective or publication. Many have been transformed beyond recognition while others, including our booth for Performance is Alive, revel in the dingy tones of cream and pale-peach paint, making use of the vaguely sordid yet standardized markers of the hotel’s architecture of transience: dated carpeting, wall-mounted televisions and lamps. We have covered the linty carpet with an uncanny layer of adhesive plastic rug-guard topped with beige drop cloths. Artist, Curator and Performance is Alive founder Quinn Dukes has been performing and managing performance events for years and knows that “performers get messy”. She is keen to support the artists and tend to the realization of their works as much as possible under the constraints of a nonexistent budget and the hotel setting. The only rule: no fire. After a day and a half of nearly round-the-clock preparation (more for many of the elaborate booths) the Satellite Art fair feels like a possible setting for a Borges story: a world within the world, with its own sense of time and cultural mores. The lobby is now equipped with a giant cereal bowl, titled F+++ Off, fashioned from a modified Doughboy pool and filled with enlarged Captain Crunch pieces sculpted out of foam. A bubble-bath fountain shaped like a giant milk carton pours down from above. Its creators, Jen Catron and Paul Outlaw don bathing suits and float in doughnut-styled inner tubes from time the fair opens until it closes each day. They take their job seriously, just like the exotic car rental agency that normally shares the lobby of the Parisian and continues its usual business throughout the fair, tending to and lending out a small stable of Lamborghinis and Rolls Royces that are parked out front. Curator Jesse Firestone (creator of the Soothing Center and an organizer of the fair along with Founder Brian Whiteley) stops into our booth for Performance is Alive. Jessie, Quinn and I joke that if we had to stay at the Parisian forever, we would survive and make our own world. Like the Eagles’ Hotel California, but with more exuberance and less downfall. The fantasy of the self-sustaining art-pod was particularly poignant in the days immediately following the presidential election. The final dissolution of the myth of American exceptionalism calls for action, and the temporary world-building represented by repurposing a hotel for a few days of art viewing (even as it participates in the commercial crush of Miami art week), can be seen as a utopic gesture, perhaps even an act of love towards a world that has revealed itself as a more troubled place than we had imagined. Nestled on the second of three floors of this most wacky and artist-powered of the Miami art fairs, Performance is Alive’s room 15 was poised to be occupied by the first of its politically-charged performances. Artists addressed the interconnected subjects of landscape and environmental destruction, race, gender, consumer capitalism, labor, violence and eroticism. In short, the range of issues that arise when the medium is the ever-political, ever-present body. |
CONTRIBUTORSIan Deleón Archives
July 2023
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