In Practice: Chance Motives
Sat, Feb 8, 2014, 12–6pm
Ben Thorp Brown and Ethan Philbrick, After Outcry, 2014. In Practice: Chance Motives. Photo: Megan Mantia
SculptureCenter is pleased to announce Chance Motives, a program of time-based work presented through In Practice, SculptureCenter's commissioning program for emerging artists. Chance Motives explores the possibilities for rupture within the ongoing performances of daily life and labor through techniques of orchestration and choreography. Loosely interpreted to include pedestrian systems, rituals, and routines; these performative modes are mobilized as alternatives to the tyranny of risk management. The works in the program make use of methods that can accommodate accident and error, in opposition to both algorithms of efficiency (devised for the hysterical demands of market production) and the pure chance operations of Fluxus.
Chance Motives is organized within the SculptureCenter galleries as an assembly of discrete presentations (and performative installations) engaging a number of themes: gesture as an index of memory; material and cultural appropriations of natural phenomena; psychic distance from the tangibility of social relationships. The unifying principle is formal, insofar as the commissioned projects deal with pacing, rhythm and synchronicity on their own terms, counter to the prevailing narrative of spectacular acceleration and the debilitating anxiety of crisis in the contemporary moment. The act of building up implies a certain degree of breaking down; the fiction of transcendence (virtuosity) is also a lack of transparency.
Choreographies by Vanessa Anspaugh (with Amber Bemak) and Ben Thorp Brown (with Ethan Philbrick) engage in processes of undoing systems; whether by contracting the time scale of long-term muscle memory to stimulate instinctual dance imperfectly, as if on-demand, or by devising a purpose for the hand-signals of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange to mark the departure of complex trading from the world of embodied signification. Laura Vitale's sonic vignettes, animated by trained and untrained bodies, register responses to shifting staging conditions (with Rebecca Warner), while Daniel Neumann's canny architectonic compositions alter tone more mechanically, however subtly. A smartphone application designed by Essex Olivares, launched for the occasion by an interactive ensemble performance, puts pressure on normative modes of digitally-directed socialization and will be freely available for user download. Expanded cinema, operatic and musical theater works by Pedro Neves Marques, Sahra Motalebi and Hayley Aviva Silverman invest alternative cultures, histories (and species) with a certain intersubjective urgency; projects by Brendan Fernandes and Nick Paparone ascribe new functionality to ordinary institutional furnishings; and filmic installations by Rachel Rose and Conrad Ventur visualize emotional trajectories through their respective spaces of projection. Chance Motives is guest curated by Kari Rittenbach.
Program:
12:00pm
Daniel Neumann, Untitled Sound Environment
Nick Paparone, Commercial Break for 'ln Practice: Chance Motives'
1:00pm
Vanessa Anspaugh and Amber Bemak, The Relay Project Part 1: Original Document
2:00pm
Sahra Motalebi, Intangible Heritages, Belief's Demise
Laura Vitale and Rebecca Warner, Four Times
3:00pm
Pedro Neves Marques, The Forest And The School: Where to sit at the dinner table?
Essex Olivares, Incorporate
4:00pm
Hayley Siverman, Bluebirds ft. 'Make Believe'
5:00pm
Ben Thorp Brown and Ethan Philbrick, After Outcry
Brendan Fernandes, Closing Line
On view:
Conrad Ventur, GEOPS
Rachel Rose, Palisades in Palisades
Nick Paparone, Seating for 'ln Practice: Chance Motives'
Sponsors
SculptureCenter's major exhibition and operating support is generously provided by grants from the National Endowment for the Arts; the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs; New York State Council on the Arts; Lily Auchincloss Foundation, Inc; Bloomberg Philanthropies; the Kraus Family Foundation; the Lambent Foundation fund of the Tides Foundation; the Joan Mitchell Foundation; the New York Community Trust; the Pollock-Krasner Foundation; the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts; the A. Woodner Fund; and contributions from our Board of Trustees. Additional funding provided by the Milton and Sally Avery Arts Foundation; Goldman Sachs; A G Foundation; the Ken and Judith Joy Family Foundation; the Peter Jay Sharp Foundation; and contributions from many generous individuals.
