underway : en cours

April 2018 - June 2018

duration: 30 days

location: Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris

materials: anything found, abandoned, or left behind (ink, paint, screws, glass, eggs, paper, string, wood, towels, paper, bottles, pitcher, plastic, tiles, hooks, wire, honey, drop cloth, chalk, photographs), Archival photographs from The Kandinsky Library at Centre Pompidou

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underway: en cours was a multi-year practice-based research project and embodied dialogue that explored (in)visible labor, anachronistic temporalities, and queer lineages by inhabiting the physical space of my “atelier” as doubly a “studio” and “workshop.”

The daily praxis was generated from my research in the Special Archives of the Kandinsky Library housed at Centre Pompidou. My primary focus in the archive was a series of nine workshops on performance art conducted by artist Gina Pane from 1978-1979. Working with the photographs and records about that workshop, I explored the “work” of performance-making by generating daily movement scores that I experimented with in my studio. The archival photographs do not depict anything special. They are photographs of workshop participants (not famous artists) in the process of learning to create performance.

In the work, I draw on my experience and embodied knowledge to read and activate the photographs as historical records that are aesthetically and phenomenologically pregnant with possibility. The work thereby highlights vectors of creative, historical, and political labor articulated by the working artist’s body.

Also a mixed-media work, the archival materials from Centre Pompidou act in concert with the sequences of photographs and videos generated during the research period. Across this visual and material history, underway: en cours plays with the visibility of women artists and queer ephemerality as well as the different institutional apparatuses that can simultaneously validate and erase both.

underway: en cours was further explored and disseminated as part of “SYMBIONT: Articulating Artistic Research” at the University of Calgary in November 2018 and the 2020-2021 ReEnactment Faculty Seminar held at the Hurford Center for Arts and Humanities at Haverford College.