Blog – Art in Odd Places

“No Reenactments Without Prior Permission” with Rory Golden

October 11, 2012 – 8:00 am

Photos courtesy of Rory Golden

Rory Golden wants to know about your romantic encounters and failed relationships.

Even if your memories of bad breakups past seem banal, Golden will inject high-drama into your dating disasters, re-imagining them as soap opera-esque vignettes. In his project “No Reenactments Without Prior Permission,” Golden creates iPhone videos using tiny dolls as puppets and distributes them via email, text message, and social media.

Part of Art in Odd Places’ 2012 festival: MODEL, “No Reenactments Without Prior Permission” requires public participation to create the video shorts. So don’t forget to look for Rory Golden on 14th Street! You might find him strolling down the street singing love songs.

We caught up with Rory Golden to learn more about his project.

AiOP: How would you describe your work?

Rory Golden: My work has been paintings, drawings, and artist books, with a recent expansion into video. The work is figurative, erotic, and expressionistic. I focused on violence for some time, looking at race and gender oppression. For example, I spent two-plus years working on a project about the violent murder of a black gay man in rural West Virginia – moved to WV for six months to do ethnographic research, did a lot of reading, interviewing people, and so on.

Making that work, I grew a lot – and so did my abilities as an artist – but it was dark. Making work about love, forgiveness, relationships, and playing with toys, is a lot more fun but no less pointed towards making powerful work.

AiOP: Where are you from?

RG: I grew up in a small town in the Miami Valley of Ohio called New Carlisle (near Dayton and Springfield). My high school was surrounded by corn fields. Then, suddenly, all I wanted to do was draw. In 2006, I was fortunate to be selected for the Abbey Mural (public art) Workshop at the National Academy of Art, taught by Grace Graupe-Pillard. That was my first exposure to a lot of great minds in the public art realm. Since then, I have worked with community groups, in particular youth groups, on art projects, but my Art in Odd Places project is a new challenge for me because it involves performance, user-generated content for video, and a new pair of red New Balance shoes.

AiOP: What interests you most about public art/performance art?

RG: Finding a way to engage with people directly; bringing art to the people instead of the other way around. I think that is interesting and inspiring. I remember watching the recent Marina Abramovic (whom I think is genius and huge) documentary (which was awesome!) – and the one critique that surfaced in a movie review I read afterwards in Hyperallergic was that the piece was only available to those who could afford to pay the MoMA entry fee. Art in Odd Places flips that model in a really intriguing and, I hope, sustainable way. But AiOP has gravitas that street or guerilla art (which I love too) don’t always garner.

AiOP: What are you hoping the audience gets out of your project?

RG: No Reenactments without Prior Permission is intended to transform people’s relationship to love – erasing the past, laughing over foibles, forgiving – and to demonstrate the power of performance art, technology, and being with people.

AiOP: What are some of the more challenging aspects of your project?

RG: I am doing ten 2-hour roving street performances, and I have no idea what that will be like or how it will land for people. I will go through a lot of emotional spaces with this …

Then, I am going somewhere to make movies in between. I need to find more actors! I need a set of decent lights! I need an iPhone 5 for faster uploading. I need to be more Twitter-like too.

Also, where are the free and open to the public restrooms on or near 14^th Street? Ask me in a month and I will be able to tell you.

The part I love is that the mixed media works on paper I am making now will be film sets for the mini-movies. I get to keep painting and drawing and incorporating them as part of a new medium and then expand my audience with social media, like a true expansion of my art practice.

AiOP: Who are some of your favorite artists?

RG: Max Beckmann. Jean-Michel Basquiat. Beverly McIver. Michael Dixon. Susannah Mira. Nicolas Dumit Estevez. The latter are contemporaries and friends. They rock.

AiOP: Any upcoming events/exhibitions?

RG: I have a solo exhibition Pack up a Little Truck and Keep it on Push: Works on Paper 2008 Forward opening at Art for Change in East Harlem on Friday, October 12. Come to the party! 7 – 11pm. This is a non-profit, volunteer-run organization that I love. When they asked me to exhibit I cried. The people there are great human beings dedicated to making a better and more inclusive world through art and community. It’s a truly incredible non-profit arts organization worthy of great support.

Wayne Northcross is curating, and we are publishing an essay he wrote about my work for the exhibition. Yes!

One last thing! Check out this radio interview with Rory Golden!

Everyday Makeup with Faith Holland

October 11, 2012 – 8:00 am

Photos courtesy of Faith Holland

by Bryanne Leeming

The history of cosmetics dates back more than 6,000 years. There are records from ancient Greece, China, Victorian England (Queen Elizabeth’s white ‘mask of youth’), and even in the Bible. In modern society, makeup has become a daily ritual that many strive to perfect. Artist Faith Holland challenges this ritual using her art, encouraging onlookers to step back and think about the routines we repeat every day. Watching her project, “Everyday Makeup” forces viewers to acknowledge the amount of time spent pampering and to really question why. After all, these masks we create for ourselves are only taken off at the end of the day! Faith Holland is a current student at the School of Visual Arts pursuing an MFA in Photography, Video, and Related Media. The Art in Odd Places 2012 MODEL Festival is her first live performance piece. In her performance, she applies one weeks-worth of makeup in one sitting, each layer adding more to the distortion of her natural self. Here’s our interview with Faith Holland:

AiOP: How would you describe your work?

Faith Holland: My work takes on a fairly wide swath of issues and forms related to some core issues of feminism, beauty, the Internet, and appropriation. I work in photography, video, performance, and some other projects I’m working on now branch into animated GIFs and web-based works.

AiOP: What interests you most about performance art?

FH: I think what draws me most to public performance is a kind of direct art–there’s no gallery system to go through and feedback from the audience is immediate. There is no middleman between you and your audience (which also makes it nerve-wracking!).

AiOP: What are some of the underlying themes of your project?

FH: “Everyday Makeup” is trying to get at the money-time dynamic of personal appearance. The project proposes the power of the cosmetics industry (among other ‘personal appearance’ industries) to compel us to buy products and use our time to alleviate the self-esteem problems that the industry itself creates within us. This commercial impetus affects our most personal, quotidian habits. These private activities are returned to the public realm through this performance so that this everyday activity can be looked at in a new way.

AiOP: How does your project fit in with this year’s theme: MODEL?

FH: The project very literally looks at one definition of modeling–making oneself look like something else. Makeup suggests a venue for self-expression and looking your best, but instead tends to conform.

AiOP: How did your project come together? What was your inspiration?

FH: This performance is part of a suite of works looking at technologies changing appearance. The beauty/technology theme began with Improving, Non-Stop, a science fiction video in which I retouch my own face and then wear the image as a mask in my everyday life, and Retouch, Reform, Refit, where still images of that mask depict each layer of the file and each pixel of my face that was changed. In my research for that project, I came across a how-to makeup video series at the New York Public Library, Professional Make-up Tips for Caucasian Women, for Asian Women, and for Black Women. This was astonishing to me, and I ended up using these videos to make a three-channel video piece called Make-up Tips in which each woman’s face is transformed, but the video only shows the ‘down’ moments when their face is not being manipulated. Despite their transformation into their ‘best selves,’ the women look uncomfortable and melancholy. This led me to thinking about makeup itself as a technology that changes appearances–I went from the most fantastical to the most realistic.

AiOP: What are some of the more challenging aspects of your project?

FH: The piece is something of an endurance piece–I put on seven layers of makeup consecutively, which is incredibly uncomfortable. But it’s this perverse usage that opens up looking at makeup, this banal feature of our everyday lives, in a new way.

AiOP: Who are some of your favorite artists?

FH: Carolee Schneemann, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Valie Export, and Sarah Lucas are all artists I’ve been thinking about a lot while making my recent work.

AiOP: Any upcoming events/exhibitions?

FH: I will be speaking about my current work via Skype at an Internet Feminism symposium at Arcadia Missa (London) on November 17th.

To see “Everyday Makeup” on 14th Street as part of Art in Odd Places, check out Faith Holland’s remaining performance times here.