PRESS RELEASE
SENTIENCE:
A PERFORMANCE SALON
Pierre Beaudoin
Valerie Lamontagne
Chrysanne Stathacos
Diane Borsato
Naomi London
On the evening of Thursday, April 27, Display Cult will
host a performance
salon, Sentience, featuring five simultaneous performances that reflect
upon sensory dimensions in performance and art. While the senses are often
considered "transparent" in their function, these performances will explore
how taste, touch, smell and sound are deeply implicated in ethical and
cultural systems. They will engage with ritualistic behaviours, domestic
culture, bodily endurance, cross cultural conflicts, corporeal excess,
the
paranormal, and conventions of conviviality.
Programmed in conjunction with the Uncommon Senses: An
Interdisciplinary
Conference on the Senses in Art and Culture, and in association with the
exhibition Vital Signs, Sentience provides an interactive, experiential
complement to the theoretical domain of the conference and the aesthetic
realm of the gallery.
WHEN: Thursday, April 27, 6-8 p.m.
WHERE: Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery/Webster
Library Building Atrium
1400 de Maisonneuve West, Concordia University, Montreal
* * *
The performances of Pierre Beaudoin emphasize the vulnerability
of the body
and its unstable relationship to objects, architecture and space. Noted
for
featuring the fragility of the body in discomforting environments, he
explores the limits of
physical and psychic unease, investigating what happens to notions of
equilibrium when confronted with intense emotions and corporeal shocks.
Diane Borsato has worked extensively with food and food-related
materials,
especially in regard to their emotional and cultural investments. She
has
served cheesecake, told jokes and eaten romantic dinners with viewers
in
seductive installations and performances. Her current work focuses on
touch, love, and in reinventing the experience of the everyday. Available
for Dancing invites visitors to engage with a cadre of formally dressed
male and female suitors -- for a foxtrot lesson, to relive a memorable
celebration, or to engage in kinaesthetic flirtation.
Working with and against the North American cultural obsession
with
therapy, advice and self-help techniques, Valerie Lamontagne has performed
as an artist consultant for personal and artistic problems. Here she will
operate a Sensorial Overload Clinic which will attend to conferencegoers'
sensory rehabilitation needs. Registered Sense NursesŪ will dispense
remedies for overstimulated noses, eyes, ears, etc., and suggest helpful
techniques to manage and properly maintain one's senses.
In accord with her monumental mural in the Gallery, Naomi
London will enact
a tasting event that will feature her signature medium -- marmalade. Her
performance, Marmalade Tasting, will feature edible souvenirs. Referencing
supermarket cheese samplings, baking competitions at county fairs, and
recipe exchanging among family and friends, London's offering of
confectionary morsels combines process-oriented performance with the
dynamics of sharing food.
Chrysanne Stathacos' "aura photographs" are on display
in the Gallery, and
her performance here will offer visitors the chance to have their aura
recorded by a specially equipped camera. By metamorphosizing an
individual's heart rate, temperature and electromagnetic field into a
unique and colourful image, Stathacos' portraits utilize innovative
technology to extend the limits of vision and explore the paranormal
science, New Age spirituality, and Eastern esoteric philosophy.
* * *
Founded by Jim Drobnick and Jennifer Fisher in 1994, Display
Cult is an
open framework for creative and interdisciplinary studies in the visual
arts. It conceives and organizes events such as exhibitions, performances,
panel discussions, conferences, educational workshops, publications and
site-specific happenings that interrogate and rethink aesthetics and the
practices of display. Display Cult's objective is to focus on artistic
and
critical strategies that stretch conventional boundaries of the aesthetic
and that engage with the corporeal aspects of experience. Through its
activities and events, Display Cult aims to creatively merge disciplines,
media and communities and to propose alternative prototypes for display
and
aesthetic engagement.
* * *
For more information, contact:
(514) 488-6808
104617.770@compuserve.com
http://alcor.concordia.ca/~senses
