Filed under:Projects
This Saturday, September 12th, I will be teaching a yoga and meditation class as a performative exploration of the concepts of inner spatial inhabitance and departure from physical space. This holistic exploration will encompass Vinyasa Flow posture sequences (asana), breathing exercises (pranayama) and meditation (dhyana) and is designed to maximize happiness, vitality and inner spatial awareness. Yogis and yoginis of levels, including beginners, are welcome to attend this free event. Please bring your own yoga mat and wear comfortable, loose fitting clothing. This performance is contribution to the Deparcitecture program at Departure Art Centre in Limehouse, London.
Deparcitecture Press Release
Deparcitecture is an invented word derived from Depart and Architecture. It is a complex system of structures inspired from the action of leaving both physical and non physical spaces.
We are constantly leaving; the old self, the room, the building. The quirky unappreciated architecture of the Art Centre’s building helps us to explore the sheer impossibilities of capturing and framing the action of leaving.
On arrival, you will step into the boarding gate lounge, contemplating the panoramic view of the aeroplane’s runway. On leaving the boarding gate you will enter a performance space, once a Danish Seamen’s mission hall, transformed into a diagonal stage by artist Roy Kerr- who presents a show “you need me because without me…”- an argument between the horizontal, vertical and diagonal plane.
We invite you to come along and encounter live art shows, talks, workshops around what Deparcitecture could mean. There are also discussions and debates. A selection of artists from diverse backgrounds are invited to present their take on Deparcitecture; architect, performer, lecturer and scientist. ,
Two days of events will be divided into three parts, PERCEPTION, PHYSICAL and NON PHYSICAL. Curated by Steph Newell.
FRIDAY 11TH SEPTEMBER
2PM-5PM EXPERIENCE DEPARCITECTURE: PERCEPTION
Tour into the installation of 45 degrees installation. Roy Kerr will be performing on a diagonal stage.
2-4PM DISCUSSION FACILITIES BY ARTISTS.
TBC
4PM ‘THE CONQUEST OF THE FOURTH DIMENSION, MAYBE FIFTH IF WE’RE SO LUCKY’ WORKSHOP. Roy Kerr. 30 Minutes.
FRIDAY 11TH SEPTEMBER
6PM-9PM EXPERIENCE DEPARCITECTURE: PHYSICAL
Tour into the installation of a 45 degree installation (see SNEAK PREVIEW). ARTISTS TO BE ANNOUNCED.
There will be stimulation of different shows in the space of three hours!! Be blown away.
DEPARC-HUH-WHAT-TECTURE?
A brief dialogue of what is exactly is Deparcitecture.
“YOU NEED ME BECAUSE WITHOUT ME…” By Roy Kerr. He will be a horizontal plane, a vertical plane and a diagonal place all arguing with each other, trying to be independent from each other.
LE-LE-LE-LE-LE-LEAVING – Roy Kerr.
An absurd humorous commentary on everything from little atoms in our bodies to the very galaxy we’re in.
THE STUDY OF DEPARCITECTURE.
Tasks will be announced unexpectedly twelve times in the name of studying Deparcitecture.
SATURDAY 12TH SEPTEMBER
6PM-9PM EXPERIENCE DEPARCITECTURE: NON-PHYSICAL
Tour into the installation of a 45 degree installation.
11.30AM YOGA CLASS. By Performance Artist Lia Chavez 1 hour.
2PM BALANCE by Carl Stevenson with performer Ana Garcia
2.30PM FILM AND DISCUSSION with Majed Aslam and John Wild.
3.30PM ‘THE CONQUEST OF THE FOURTH DIMENSION, MAYBE FIFTH IF WE’RE SO LUCKY’ WORKSHOP. Roy Kerr. 30 Minutes.
4PM TOUR INTO THE MIND OF THE ARTISTS.
Question the artists and find out about the thinking behind the show.
This is something London has not seen before.
HOW TO GET TO DEPARTURE ARTS CENTRE
1 minute walk from DLR Limehouse.
Bus 15 from Oxford Circus, Trafalgar Square, St Paul’s Cathedral (Millenium Bridge), Momunment Aldgate (tube station)
Bus 135 from Old Street (tube station), Shoreditch High Street, Liverpool Street ((tube station), Aldgate.(tube station).
D5 from Bethnal Green (tube station) and Whitechapel (tube station).
September 7, 2009
Secrets, confessions, excavations…
Over the past few days, I have had the pleasure of developing a performance art symposium with my colleagues and fellow performance artists at Goldsmiths College.
Themes of the confessional, sharing secrets, achieving deepened creative liberty, interpersonal connectivity, and personal excavation, have been constant treads throughout our conversation.
This gave me the idea of creating a little space for confessions to be shared…a place of off-loading, of writing secrets down, casting them outside of oneself like lines of intimacy extending out into the world, of acknowledgment and unearthing, of celebration, ownership, therapeutic community and self-examination.
So here’s an invitation to you. You are cordially invited to join me in this virtual confession room to anonymously explore, off-load, own, celebrate, purge, acknowledge, bring into the light, hold up to the sky, magnify. Please remember this is not about guilt or anything even remotely Catholic. It’s about celebrating secrets and liberating latent creative energy! I think many of our secrets contain critical clues to our hearts’ deepest desires. And sharing them can help facilitate a lighter, freer, more creatively liberated way of living.
Welcome to the Creative Confession Room.
May 12, 2009
An exquisite coffee table book has been published for the Hillman+Chavez show by Affirmation Arts. For information regarding purchasing this publication, please contact Affirmation Arts in New York.
October 22, 2008
ITCH Magazine, a publication on creative writing and visual art out of South Africa, features recent light paintings as cover art in its current issue, entitled rather intriguingly, the * Issue. Read on.
October 1, 2008
PRESS RELEASE
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact: Marla Goldwasser
marla@affirmationarts.com
Advent 1, 2008, Unique Ilfochrome Print, 48 x 60 inches
Hillman + Chavez
September 19 – October 24, 2008
Opening Reception September 19th 6-8pm
August 28, 2008: New York, NY: Affirmation Arts is pleased to announce the opening of Hillman + Chavez on September 19, 2008. The exhibition inaugurates the collaboration of William T. Hillman and Lia Chavez. A book, with an introduction by Gary Sangster, accompanies the exhibition. Both artists will be present at the September 19th reception from 6-8pm.
Thirteen large, unique photographic works created within the past year will be exhibited. These innovative photographs explore light and space, while abstractly presenting the figure as form. Sangster writes “For Hillman + Chavez the lure of light coupled with the lure of the body – in particular bodies in motion or bodies under tension, physical or psychological – is accentuated through the elaboration of a new, hybrid photographic technique that enmeshes digital photography, with traditional photography and the static silhouette system of the photogram.”
Trained as a painter and academic, William T. Hillman studied landscape painting at the Lacoste School of the Arts in France and portraiture and anatomy at the Art Students League in New York City. He received an MA and an MBA from Princeton and Columbia Universities. He has experimented throughout his career, moving from painting to montage to computer-digitized photographic images. Recently represented by Barry Friedman Ltd. and shown at Splash, at the Leila Taghinia-Milani Heller Gallery in New York, Hillman will be included in TINA B. -The Prague Contemporary Art Festival: Forms of Engagement in the fall of 2008. Hillman, American born in 1954, lives and works in New York City.
Lia Chavez studied art and art history in Florence, Italy, and at Goldsmiths College, University of London, as well as gender theory, anthropology, and visual cultures at the International Gender Studies Center, University of Oxford. Her multimedia work, which focuses on photography, has been exhibited in London, New York, and Europe. Recent exhibitions include Lifeblood, at Samuel Klein Contemporary Art, London; Shot and Go: A Vision of Today’s International Photography, Venice; and Nightcomers, Tenth International Istanbul Biennial, Istanbul. Chavez, American born in 1978, lives and works in London.
Gallery hours: Monday – Friday 10am-6pm and Saturday 11am-5pm. For more information, including images and catalogue, please contact Marla Goldwasser at 212 925 0092 or via email marla@affirmationarts.com
Go, 2008, Unique Ilfochrome Print, 108 x 144 inches
September 5, 2008
I have contributed a dance-based photograph to “Golden Rain”, a beautiful project for “On the Edge” at the Eigeroya lighthouse in Egersund by Michael Petry, American international multimedia artist and one of the founders of the Museum of Installation in London. The programme is organized by Ha Gamle Prestegard as part of Stavanger 2008 European Capital of Culture. Exhibition runs from 4 May through 31 August.
The “Golden Rain” project as described by Michael Petry:
“Danae (the Greek for parched) was the daughter of the King of Argos. He had been warned by an oracle that a grandson would kill him, so had her locked in a bronze tower. Zeus the king of the gods, looking down on her with lusty intensions came to her as a golden shower and thus she was with child, Perseus.
“The King fearing to kill the child of a god, locked his daughter and the child in a wooden chest and threw them into the sea to drown. Zeus instructed Poseidon the god of the seas to save them. Perseus grew to be the first mythic hero, killing the Medusa, the Gorgon and in a sporting accident, an old man, who turned out to be his grandfather the King.
“Stavanger is located is in the Rogaland region on the west coast of Norway and has its own tradition of sailing, ships, towers and myths. Stavanger has been chosen along with Liverpool in the UK as the European Capital City of Culture for 2008. A year long festival of visual and performing arts will take place in each city and its surrounding environment. Rogaland’s many lighthouses no longer function as guardians of the shore (thanks to satellite navigation) and six of them have been turned over to artists for the project. When I was asked to make an installation at Egersund I thought of the classical tale of Danae and wanted to link the past with the present, the origin of western culture with a site already deep with its own myths and the erotic realm of today which is always a concern in my work.
“I will make a shower of Golden Rain inside the Eigeroya lighthouse. There will be 100 mirrored golden vessels suspended down the centre of the tower. Each vessel, shaped like a raindrop, tear, or possibly an odd bottle will be sealed at the top by a cork. Inside the vessels I will place 100 texts, images, drawings, photographs, objects or ideas sent to me by other artists and authors. I have asked them to think about what they would write, draw or mark on a sheet of paper (up to A4 size), if they too were locked in such a tower and had only a bottle as a means of discourse with the outside world, if they were on the edge, what would they place in the golden bottle? Each response has been documented so that its contents will be seen in the accompanying catalogue to the project, and has now been permanently sealed in one of the bottles.
“I want the project to be a discussion with other artists as much as the artefact that we install, for lighthouses are there to speak, of danger of the shore, of the people inside them, and I will ask them to speak as well.”
Michael Petry’s glass bottles
Participating artists include:
Viel Bjerkeset Andersen
Wendy Anderson
Sue Arrowsmith
Halldór Ásgeirsson
Per Barclay
Travis Barker
Phyllida Barlow
Amelia Black
Eliza Bonham Carter
Per Christian Brown
Kjetil Borheim
Sophie Buxton
Simon Callery
Gloria Carlos
Mara Castilho
Lia Chavez
Maria Chevska
Alain Chiaradia
Anne-marie Creamer
Judith Cowan
Elizabeth Croft
Mikey Cuddihy
Ian Davenport
Debra Davis
Matthew Dalziel + Louise Scullion
Angela de la Cruz
Richard Dyer
Roberto Ekholm
Simon English
Jens Erland
Karen Erland
Thomas Hylland Eriksen
Nick Fox
Michael Gabriel
Jon Gershon
Sunil Gupta
Martin Gustavsson
Bill Hartman
Joe Havel
Wendy Hanson
Anthony Harris
Denise Hawrysio
David Hutchinson
Giedymin Jablonski
Terrell James
Nathan Slate Joseph
Juliane Jung
Hosook Kang
Habib Kheradyar
Jukka Korkeila
Laura Lark
Darryl Lauster
Matts Leiderstam
Micah Lexier
Marcella Lorenzi
Julia Manheim
Stuart Mayes
Rosie McGoldrick
Wojciech Mokwinski
Simon Morley
Lisa Morgan
Bryan Mulvihill
Piotr Nathan
Terry New
Frode Gundorf Nielsen
Monika Oechsler
Uriel Orlow
Predrag Pajdic
Kjell Pahr-Iversen
Fabian Peake
Ruudt Peters
Jacqui Poncelet
Karen Pontoppidan
Daniel Rees
Liam Reeves
Pipilotti Rist
Chad Sager
Maya Schindler
Eric Schnell
Rebecca Scott
Berni Searle
Fin Serck-Hanssen
Caroline Smith
Kate Smith
Rob Smith
Terry Smith
Bente Sommerfeldt-Colberg
Dan Sturgis
Adéla Svobodova
Hege Tapio
Steffen Tast
Helge Torvund
Patrick Traer
Andrew Tullis
Natalie Turner
Marianne Uutinen
Craig Voller
David Waterworth
Klaus Wehner
Lynette Yiadom-Boake
April 27, 2008
Used to hold one’s garments together, to bind and compose a person in his coverings. Used to promise, seduce and guarantee tenderness and intimacy. Used to intimidate, threaten, punish. Used to wound and numb. Like an equator, it divides mind from body, reason from sex; sacred from profane, profane from sacred. When removed, it signifies nudities, ambiguities. A symbol of wholeness/ brokenness, connection/ disconnection, aggression and alienation in relationship. The inspiration behind a new video piece entitled “Welts and Belts”.
I bought the belt (pictured below) in London from a store which sells religious kitsch fashion. When I wear it these days, it carries for me a heavier allusion to the way America is perceived in much of the world…sexy violent American hips trying too hard to push a soul they themselves don’t want badly enough.
June 28, 2007
For the past two years, the brilliant electronic composer, Andrew Gaskins, and I have collaborated on a series of rewarding projects exploring the convergence of our respective media.
This fall, Gaskins and I are taking our Schoenberg-Kandinskian inspired collaboration to the next level by integrating live performances into our repertoire. And with live performances, we will expand into the exciting territory of immersive installations, video painting and bio-generative art.
We’ll launch the new phase of our project, called BrightBlack, at a private event for industry in the Western Region of the US in mid-September.
The new website www.brightblack.org will be launched in mid-September.
“We do not have to understand black, it is the primeval ground.” – Paul Klee
August 28, 2006