At the opening of the MFA Show on April 29, Wang Ye-fang (also known as Frank) put on an impromptu performance with a live llama on State Street in front of the Sullivan Galleries. He drew quite a crowd during rush hour. You can see a virtual reality piece by Frank in the North Sullivan Gallery as part of the Grand Bazaar.

-Bryce Dwyer, curator

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IMPACT: Performance Festival
SAIC Performance Space and remote sites
280 S. Columbus Drive
May 7 and 8, 7:00 p.m.

Witness the next wave of performance art as SAIC graduate and undergraduate students completing their degrees in Performance present their thesis works, which cross the borders of theater, movement, and the visual arts. IMPACT brings together a dynamic selection of contemporary performance that is visceral, conceptual and embodied. The work on view pushes the hybrid boundaries of ephemeral practices and creates a unique experiential environment in constant flux. For two exuberant evenings, the artists will engage multiple sites within the building and within the audience as they explore architecture, myth, memory and process.

Featuring work by: Sebastian Alvarez, Lee Blalock, Vicki Fowler, Rae Langes, Jennifer Mills, Anthony Romero, Stuart Schmidt, Jillian Soto, and Georgia Wall.

Distinguished Alumni Guest MC: Joseph Ravens
Producers: Marissa Perel and Michael Fleming

Matthew Schlagbaum, "If Recollecting Were Forgetting," 2010, Frames, personal objects and plastic wrap

By questioning notions of stability, authenticity, value (both personal and social), and communication and its failure, the artists in Both/And explore the tenuous nature of our ability to lend concrete and stable meanings to people, objects, the environment and personal identity. They address our own fragile attempts to carveout places for ourselves within society’s limitations and boundaries.

Here’s a snippet of the conversation:

JT: Nicole and Liene, you collaborate with publics and with spaces, and Marissa and Luis, you collaborate with environments and your environments collaborate, as well, with other mechanisms or structures. Can you talk about how that type of collaboration functions in your work?

MB: We’ve definitely come to a joint collaboration between ourselves but we force these living organisms or plants to collaborate with us — whether they choose to or not [laughs]. They seem to grow quite well so I don’t think they’re necessarily unhappy in this collaborative venture.

LP: It’s a dialogue. It’s an exchange. Both with each other and with these biological beings. They’re forced to collaborate, but at the same time, afterwards they engage — they engage the public and they engage us. So it becomes a collaboration, and in the end a very fruitful collaboration, in my mind.

"BRRGS Generation 1.2" by (GRAFT), Marissa Benedict and Luis Palacios, on view at 22 S. Wabash

MB: There is this interesting element too where with the major pieces that we’ve developed there’s maintenance or care necessary, so there’s this dialogue that we’ve been trying to develop — a kind of Mierle Laderman Ukeles way of ongoing manual maintenance. In this piece for the MFA show, we’ll be there everyday. When we’re there, we’re there to discuss with the public but when we’re not, it’s the plant that interfaces with the public. So there’s these different levels of us working with the plant, [us] working with the public, the plant working with the public and with us. And so it’s quite an interesting layered collaborative.

"City Souvenirs" by Nicole Seisler and Liene Bosquê

LB: I think for us it’s dealing with the public space. Part of the project is going to the streets and having this encounter with the pedestrians, so I think it’s also a way to invite people to collaborate with us and to participate.

NS: For us, I’m not sure if collaboration is the right word because I think it probably is more participation.

MB: With the public? The public participation?

NS: Yeah, exactly. I think there’s definitely a difference between how you guys [Luis and Marissa] collaborate and how we [Liene and I] collaborate. The way the public interfaces with us is very much for a moment. They are very much a part of the work, but I think more as a participant in that moment. And for us, that element developed with the project. As we did more walks, and people were approaching us and showing their curiosity, we really had to figure out what that element was for us. And it has become one of the most important parts of it.

Full recording coming soon.

Follow these projects here:

http://graftcollaborative.wordpress.com/

http://citysouvenirs.wordpress.com/

Curious about the artists’ other works– the ones that didn’t make it into the MFA exhibition?  Here are some additional works by artists in Or Just After that didn’t make it into the exhibition:

Collage, by Ashley Thomas

Wintervention by Ellen Nielson

Artist's Book by Heather McShane

A sculpture by Bobbie Meier

Orbs and Cavities, Bobbi Meier

JC: You study in the Fiber & Materials department, but you are showing photography.  Can you describe the role of medium in your process? (ie, how/why do you move between sculpture and photography— could you do one with out the other?)

BM: Experimentation with materials as a means to involve my hand in the work and create meaning is an important aspect of my process. My initial interest in sculpture was as a meditative practice, making small objects out of polymer clay while riding the “L”. The sculptures are embedded with personal struggle, as I manipulate them into shapes and forms through tying, binding, stabbing, and using a variety of hard and soft materials.

The move to photography came out of a desire to entice the viewer into an invented world that is suggestive and provocative. With the camera I am able to control areas of investigation in my sculptures, offering images that are ambiguous and open to interpretation. The process between sculpture and photography in this body of work is intertwined to the point where one could not exist without the other.

JC: Your work in the MFA show is very corporeal but a couple works pull me out of that bodily realm, as they seem to point to ambiguous macro-landscapes.  Can you talk about what subject matter serves as your point of inquiry?  Are you most interested in representation or more of a sensorial experience?

BM: When I am in the studio creating these works I have noticed that so much of the imagery comes from a process of turning and moving my objects around, while analyzing them through the macro lens of the camera. The material used to make the sculptural source, scale, and composition, tend to dictate the reference to body or landscape. My intention is primarily sensorial even when the work is representational. I want the viewer to wonder and question the origin of the images. It is the engagement of sensibilities involving seduction, mystery and discomfort that I find interesting.

Installation View, Bobbi Meier "Obs and Cavities"

Strangulated Orb (Bobbi Meier)