TAKING PLACE
Projects by SACI students of Installation and Performance Art
Wednesday, April 23, 2014 at 2:00pm
Studio Art Centers International – Palazzo Maidoff
Via Sant’Egidio, 14 – Florence, ITALY
To emphasize the aesthetics in the sense of ‘aesthesis’: an autonomous regime of experience. – Claire Bishop
Gwynneth Alldis, Emily Blasier, Brian Cobb, Jessica Daynes, Jake Musich and Olivia Wilcox present the projects elaborated throughout the course of “Installation and Performance Art” instructed by Pietro Gaglianò.
Through experiences of critical analysis, both of their work and of the social context, the students have been guided to the awareness of an uncertain and soft border between private and public, body and space, individual perception and social matters. “Taking place” is just the last project they elaborated after many occasions of conceptual and formal practices around the linguistic, emotional and cultural intersections into the contemporary landscape.
Jake Musich created a piece that works as a public retrospection on his time abroad: “an amalgam of performance and installation, a composite sound track of an original poem read in two languages (Italian and English). The space, between my normal life and my life abroad, is taken both literally and figuratively.”
Gwynneth Alldis, with her individual performance expresses a problematic observation on herself and specifically on her body: “My goal is to reclaim a body that I once felt trapped inside”. She works on the legacy of the historical body performance and she shifts it in an intimate and ‘therapeutic” interpretation.
The title of the installation by Emily Blasier is the English version of a Latin phrase used in a famous 15th-century Elizabethan painting. The piece raises questions of the viewer’s individual definitions of the concepts opulence, elegant, truthful and loving. “How can we use objects and material earthly things to enable our connection to the spiritual world?”
Brian Cobb presents a delegated performance involving friends and objects: the performers will be driven in into a “motion with gestures they are compelled to complete at their own pace.” Cobb’s project is about the rhythm things have inside, and about the interpretation of the surface of reality.
Olivia Wilcox says “It is hard to always be present when our minds are preoccupied with the chaos of the world around us,” and she experiments a performance concerning the perception of space and others. Specifically she focuses on the instinctive or meditated awareness we elaborate in conditions of stress.
Jessica Daynes looks at the public space longing for a confirmation, a re-appropriation, and she plays her performance (in collaboration with Olivia Wilcox) down Via Sant’Edigio: “in order to inhabit a new sense of personal space until our normal area is regained. The size of our bodies is reflected from the space we are in.”
The performance projects will be presented according to the schedule below. Installations and Alldis’ performance, will run for the whole day.
Schedule
2.00: Jake Musich, untitled, installation, 1st floor
2.15: Gwynneth Alldis, Zebra, performance – Lecture Hall, 1st floor
2.45: Emily Blasier, Elegant Because of Love, installation, garden
3.00: Brian Cobb, untitled, performance, garden
3.30: Olivia Wilcox, Are we aware?, performance, ground floor
4.00: Jessica Daynes, Personal Territories, performance, public space
