NEWS
Posted on Monday, August 6th, 2012 1:00 pm
NOWINSKI AND KNERR COLLABORATE
In conjunction with the Streaming the 25th Hour, Maggie Nowinski has invited artist and writer, Erika Knerr, to workshop a collaborative performance that has been developing since early 2012. Spectators are encouraged to observe, photograph and walk around during the performance-action on Wednesday, August 15th, 1:00 - 4:00 p.m. in Flywheel at 43 Main St, Easthampton. See full exhibition performance schedule here.
Nowinski and Knerr will make a durational drawing to mark time, broken narratives, abrupt and successful moments of mindful, focused mark-making, writing, and meditative practices. Meanwhile they will use various instruments, including their own voices, to randomly dictate activity halts. When the time is announced (artists will take turns), they must both stop, move together to support each other in transition, and move on to a different section of the drawing surface. Transitions will be experienced and illustrated by coming together to count breaths. Viewers can expect to see and hear various time change indicators, such as bells, cymbals, timers, glasses, gongs and bones; artists will be drawing and writing with mixed media on a large-scale piece of paper on the floor for most of the time.
While Maggie Nowinski has used performance approaches in her visual arts work since 2006 it has not been live, presented in video format as a small part of larger exhibitions. Streaming and this collaboration represents new territory in her art practice. In 2009 she and collaborator Burns Maxey created Mimeses, a video piece that was both documentative and fictionalized for an exhibition at Mobius in Boston. Later in 2010 they incorporated live and video performances as part of Reflections, a large-scale video-based project conceptually rooted in notions of mapping practices while addressing place, movement, collective and personal observation. In 2010 and 2011, for Swallowed, Nowinski created video performances to process the reality of bottled water consumption by manipulating her body with the primary materials of the exhibition (thousands of used plastic water bottles). In 2011 performance was used as a singular form of visual expression in Reflecting My Environment, walks I-III. Shown as a video after the live event, these walks incorporate humor to contemplate through experience notions of visibility, invisibility and conceptions of natural and fabricated environments.
Erika Knerr frequently incorporates experimental performance practice in her work and participates with other performance artists. Her performance work has evolved around painting and large scale installations. Her works have been included in one person and group exhibitions and festivals internationally, including Mediations Biennale in Poznan, Poland in 2008. She also collaborates with the experimental LAB group and in 2012 performances included work with SWITCH TV, based out of Holyoke Massachusetts, and as a performer for part of David Teeple's exhibition at UMASS MoCA in Walking Water. Knerr has presented durational performance actions within installation settings a number of times. Much of her work explores themes of mindfulness, loss, the marking of time as both a political and spiritual practice. Knerr is also the publisher of New Observations magazine, and editorial director of Artist Organized Art and an active art critic. Most recently her review was featured in Art in America, May 2012.
