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    Short Stories, Part Four: Performance Program

    Sun, Dec 4, 2011, 5–7pm

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    Part Four: Performance Program by Sarah Chacich, Angie Keefer, and Danna Vajda
    December 4

    SculptureCenter is pleased to announce the fourth and final part of a unique exhibition series Short Stories, guest curated by Isla Leaver-Yap. Short Stories navigates the fabricated spaces of representation. It questions the role of art historian and critic as the best readers of an artwork, favoring instead the internal logic and fiction of the artist's practice. The series will feature rotating solo exhibitions by six New York-based artists, an onsite reading room, as well as readings and performances. Exhibiting artists include: Alejandro Cesarco, Iman Issa, Ursula Mayer, Ben Schumacher, Danna Vajda and Rona Yefman. The reading room, configured in collaboration with Angie Keefer, also features work by Sarah Chacich, Matt Keegan, and Rita Sobral Campos.

    During each month of Short Stories, SculptureCenter's lower level galleries have been turned over to two artists who will each present an autonomous exhibition project. The rear ground floor gallery, meanwhile, will be transformed into a reading room, a locus and constant throughout the duration of project. It features art works, books selected by the artists in relation to their exhibition presentations, commissioned texts, audio works and other ephemera. This space acts as a site of production and dissemination, where the accrual of material will also serve as the documentation for Short Stories. For the closing night of the Short Stories exhibition series Sarah Chacich, Angie Keefer, and Danna Vajda will present a series of live performances.

    Through the artist independently fashioned narratives, Short Stories presents work engaged in the architecture of how to read and write the object, the image, and the practice. Short Stories takes the notion of 'reading' as a framework through which an artist might begin to construct personal positions and self-determined subjects.

    Angie Keefer is a New York-based writer, editor, amateur engineer, and occasional librarian whose speculative non-fiction traces circuitous routes through highly specialized information. For Short Stories: Part Four, Keefer presents a biography of General Piesc. Borrowing the title character from Stefan Themerson's 1967 novel Geneneral Piesc: The Case of The Forgotten Mission, Keefer will adapt a public talk from a narrative born in reverse.

    Sarah Chacich delivers a short presentation that investigates the act of reading in relationship to art. Examining the hierarchy that exists between thought, image and language (where language is often the dominant form), Chacich uses the materiality of reading as a means to interrogate forms of self-reflexivity in art. Her presentation is a scripted performance without a code of authorship. Borrowing from various formats--the radio play, the lecture presentation, the artist performance, the public demonstration--Chacich seeks to identify the element of surrender in the live exchange between artist and audience.

    BYOB is Danna Vajda's ongoing performance series that explores the climate of political relativism and free associations emanating from personal experience of working with divergent discursive constructs, such as "policy research groups," activist organizations and artworld panel discussions. The script for BYOB is reworked for each public performance. Consequently, for its sixth edition, BYOB (#6 people in a glass house throwing stones) investigates the physical infrastructure of thinking in relation to the body and the building.