TOREY AKERS and LOUISE AKERS
Alien Year
2019
dimensions variable
mixed media
Sara Nishikawa
Untitled Paint Tray
2017
dimensions variable
2x4s, steel, silicone
DAEUN FLORA KANG
Flora (7/21/2019)
2019
dimensions variable
mixed media
STATEMENT:
Performance studies pioneer Peggy Phelan has made countless contributions to her field, but the most famous has to be her emphasis on ephemerality as a taxonomical hallmark; in her parlance, “performance’s only life is in the present. Performance cannot be saved, recorded, documented, or otherwise participate in the circulation of representation of representations: once it does so, it becomes something other than performance.” While this might sound theater-essentialist (she has a lot to say about Foucaultian domination over the silent spectator—sexy) and somewhat Draconian, ontologically, it squares. Performance’s purpose is experiential, its meaning local to the arena of its consumption. Interestingly, Phelan also championed “performative writing”, an avant-garde form of linguistic sketching that “enacts the death of the ‘we’” and purported to upend linear knowledge accrual or expression as a hierarchical modality. Given that writing is an inherently editioned communication tool, this perspective marks a shift in subjectivity from audience perception as its defining operative to the nexus artistic creation. Is the inimitable voice in your head that reads text performative? If a film isn’t performative, is the thrill of watching one for the first time? To whom? And how does the concept of a proxy fit in to all this?
In the context of our project, Alien Year, we’re interested in interrogating transience as a performative function in 2019, a late-capitalist limbo in which even the most fleeting material functions take insidious forms of permanence—memes die, sure, but the internet doesn’t; that H&M shirt might not make it through the wash, but the carbon footprint of its creation took an insurmountable toll. Our shared status-quo privileges self-mediation. We are digitized, surveilled, patrolled, virtually reified, and happy to reconstruct the panoptical influence of the state in the most mundane interactions. Our “performance as proxy”, then, is the Marxist charaktermaske, the avatar, the moment-to-moment mechanical changeling that undergirds every aspect of contemporary society. Ephemerality only occurs in the eye of the beholder, then, and memory, longing, and its multifold queered integrations could constitute performative echoes, cast-shadows of interpersonal theater. Nothing is live anymore, and memory has changed drastically as a result. When we talk about mourning, we are necessarily recalibrating dynamics that lost their authenticity decades ago. When we talk about proxies, we are merely assuming human precedent. Alien Year attempts to seed performativity in both creation and consumption simultaneously, encouraging the viewer to reconsider performance as a cycle, as a promise, and as an outright, if delectable, impossibility.
BIOS:
Torey Akers is a Brooklyn-based artist and writer. She received her MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art in 2016, and currently works as an editorial assistant for Artspace magazine.
Louise Akers is a poet living in Queens, NY. They earned their MFA from Brown University in May of 2018, the Keith and Rosemarie Waldrop Prize for Innovative Writing in 2017, and the Confrontation Poetry Prize in 2019. Louise’s work can be found in Fugue Journal, Confrontation Magazine, DREGINALD, bæst, and elsewhere.
STATEMENT:
So much of my sensibility has to do with living in the age of melon ballers.
I focus on objects that serve as representations of the utilitarian objects that are part of our everyday routine. Drawing inspiration from existing objects, I make alternatives that hope to disrupt the comforts of the everyday. They are outlines of the proposed objects, negating original function to redefine their purpose.
Quiet and still, the work exists as an alternative object. Activated, the participant becomes implicit in the physicality of the silicone and its sound effects.
BIO:
Sara Nishikawa was born and raised in Honolulu, Hawaii. After receiving her BA and MA in Los Angeles, she moved to Michigan to pursue an MFA in Ceramics at Cranbrook Academy of Art. She currently lives and works in Detroit.
STATEMENT:
I always wanted a loss of my body.
In a likeness of shimmer, breeze, and smoke.
A total transparency.
Flora is a performer who is biologically related to the artist, Daeun Flora Kang. Flora shares Kang’s blood, tissue, cells, and bacteria.
In Performance//Proxy, Flora questions the meaning of the artist’s physical presence in the contemporary art world. Performance expands and converges across multiple layers of time, space, screens and bodies all at once. But as singular beings, the potential for movement in this world is a privilege, and wholly existing in multiple spaces/times at once, an impossibility. Kang challenges this scheme by shaping a willful mediation under the tone of postcolonial feminism. It is re-presenting the artist’s absence with the artist’s apparent presence using a byproduct of their Korean female body. Flora traveled from the military base in Daegu, South Korea via international shipping—x-rayed, sat on an airplane, traversed several time zones and the international dateline, and assessed at customs—to arrive in Hamtramck, MI in time for the exhibition.
BIO:
Daeun Flora Kang (b. 1994) is an interdisciplinary artist currently working in South Korea. Kang’s work explores the human condition through a development of TCK (Third Culture Kid) visual language. Her interests lie in the vernacular of human bodies, methods of food production, and habituation as a coping mechanism. Kang is an MFA candidate at Cranbrook Academy of Art in the Sculpture department, and she earned a BFA degree from Savannah College of Art and Design in 2017. She is a recipient of SCAD Academic and Achievement Scholarships, Korean Air Force Military Scholarships, and Korean Gifted Program Sponsorship.