This year's Henry Satellite at Bumbershoot celebrates performance in contemporary art. Grand Openings, a New York-based performance collective consisting of Ei Arakawa, Jutta Koether, Jay Sanders, Emily Sundblad, and Stefan Tcherepnin will utilize the Rainier Room as a site of meta-performance. A large E-shaped stage is the place where anything, everything, and nothing will take place. During the festival, there will be workshops by Grand Openings and their friends, such as Hisham Mayat of Sublime Frequencies, Daniel Menche, Lee Williams, and K8 Hardy. The room's usual function as a conference room inspired the seminar-like approach to the artists activities.
These workshops and activities include:
• Umbrella dance • Bizarre international music videos • Pink Noise Paintings and Sound (manifest moment) • Theory of the Jeune-Fille • Interior decorating • Grunge & Riot • Pain dance • Forgetting the stage • Anthology Film Archive moment
The final performance will take place Sunday from 6 - 7:30 PM in the Rainier Room. An exhibition detailing all the events will follow on Monday.
Grand Openings' one-of-a-kind performances challenge our expectations and the presumed roles of performers, producers, directors, and observers. The actions of the final performance will develop organically over the course of the festival weekend in a highly collaborative manner. Grand Openings also features videos produced by members of Sublime Frequencies concentrating on obscure festivals and styles of music from around the world; documentation of previous Grand Openings performances; and other examples of multi-disciplinary performance art. These video programs are also organized by Grand Openings.
Grand Openings was founded in 2005. They have performed at Performa05 at Anthology Film Archives (New York); magical Artroom (Tokyo); Echigo-Tsumari Triennial 2006 (Nigata, Japan); and MUMOK (Vienna). Their videos have been exhibited at Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati; Kunsthalle Zürich Parallel; and Tbilisi 3 and Tbilisi 4 (Tbilisi, Geogia).
The Henry Art Gallery satellite exhibition was curated by Betsey Brock, Associate Director of Communications and Outreach and Sara Krajewski, Associate Curator.
A memorable work of literature will elicit a powerful visceral response in its audience, an intimate kind of dialog between writer and reader. But when a book is published, it is meant not just for an audience of one. Great writing offers rich source material for public forms of interpretation and adaptation. Some adaptations are literal, others simply evocative of a feeling or mood.
The short videos assembled in this playlist vary wildly in their approach to adaptation (from Jack Feldsteins neon interpretation of Prousts quest to the unlikely backdrop of Bukowskis The Last Days of the Suicide Kid), but each presents an homage to one of four pivotal writers of the 20th century (Marcel Proust, Charles Bukowski, Jorge Luis Borges, and Thomas Pynchon) and each adeptly conveys the universal human sensation of loss. What is lost is not always clear but is incessantly palpable.
At the heart of Marcel Prousts greatest work À la recherche du temps perdu is the passage of time and memory.
In The Last Days of the Suicide Kid, Charles Bukowskis loss is laid bare: anticipating a time when he no longer feels virile or consequential, as life continues to go on around him, without him.
An obsessive fear of mirrors led to their presence in much of Jorge Luis Borgess work. For Borges, mirrors (los espejos) break down illusions we create around ourselves that we are ultimately incapable of sustaining. They see us for who we are, and remind us that we are mortal; the mirror will still be standing when we are no longer there to be reflected.
To lose ones self, to lose ones grasp of what is real and what is not, has rarely been conveyed more compellingly than in Thomas Pynchons Crying of Lot 49.
Finally, as a viewer of these works (which are, in turn, interpretations of original works) we must wonder: what is lost in translation between the authors intent and the audiences interpretation?
The Henry Art Gallery delivers a direct experience of the art of our time.
The Henry Art Gallery engages diverse audiences in the powerful experience of artistic invention and serves as a catalyst for the creation of new work that inspires and challenges. Exhibitions, collections, and public programs stimulate research and teaching at the University of Washington, provide a creative wellspring for artists, and reveal a record of modern artistic inquiry from the advent of photography in the mid-19th century to the multidisciplinary art and design of the 21st.
The Henry Art Gallery delivers a direct experience of the art of our time.
The Henry Art Gallery engages diverse audiences in the powerful experience of artistic invention and serves as a catalyst for the creation of new work that inspires and ch...
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