Allison Halter “R Kelly: A Critical Appreciation”
Performance art utilizes real time, real space, and often times, real bodies. These are materials that everyone can understand, making the medium accessible to a wide variety of audiences. Performance art, however, has roots in conceptual art, which utilizes a language all it’s own. I am always enticed by performance that makes use of the […]
Jeffrey Byrd “The Boss”
Jeffrey Byrd describes his work as exploring metaphoric potentials of the human body the relationships between reality and artifice through original music and otherworldly vocals. To this should be added human relations and decision theory. His brilliant command of the audience that sat present during his performance was a great exercise in subjectivity and how […]
Zackary Drucker “The Story of Lynn Harris”
The theme of Thursday’s video series was Corporal Discomfort, a concept that echoed the unease brought about by each of the day’s performances. They all involved some degree of suffering on the part of the performer, eliciting a kind of sympathy pain from audience members. The descriptor “hard to watch” came to mind frequently. Carlos […]
Beverly Fre$h “Mr. Midwest”
Beverly crosses borders with his performance. The interlocutor identity that goes from preacher to hip-‐hop MC, to possibly mentally disturbed or handicapped individual plays off one another well. Whether this is intentional or just the outcome of the multi-‐faceted performer to watch Beverly is to be entranced. At the end of the performance you feel […]
Permission to Engage: Meaning Machines
“Meaning Machines, a 3.5 hour ensemble performance piece by Rooms, the Chicago-‐ based performance art duo (couple, team), Marrakesh and Todd Frugia, was exhibited June 4th, 2013 as part of the Rapid Pulse Performance Art Festival. 7 performers, dressed in white linen costumes were blindfolded and listened through earphones to a series of pre-‐recorded, individually […]
Wanda Raimundi-Ortiz’s “Bargain Basement Sovereign”
At a firm and slow pace, Wanda Raimundi-Ortiz quietly and commandingly walks through the semi-circle formed audience that sits on the floor of gallery. Raimundi-Ortiz and her assistants, Kaitlyn Helene Sass & Diandra Miller, are dressed in wigs and exaggerated makeup as they enter the main space of the Defibrillator. One of the assistants carries her […]
Dolores Wilber + Sarah Wilber’s Walking Tour
On the corner of Ashland and Division, inside that one CVS couched within a historic bank building, a few strides in and many feet above the Division street entrance, hovers a lone Spongebob Squarepants balloon, looking diminutive and out-of-place against the building’s Classical Revival-style ceiling. It’s the kind of detail only someone intimately familiar with […]
Andrew Barco “Pale Blue Eyes”
For Andrew Barco’s Pale Blue Eyes participant were lined up outside of Defibrillator and were seated or asked to stand in certain places to observe the performance. On one side of the space there was a small radio and on the other side Andrew Barco stood at a light table using a razor and a […]
Kambui Olujimi “A Life in Pictures”
I know, I know! This was my introduction to Kambui Olujimi and the first conversation we had on Monday as I walked into his durational relational aesthetics performance piece titled “A life in picture” which was being conducted in the HUB. The story goes… As a child, Kambui was a know it all and never […]