PerformIT 2007

A one-night event of performance and video, Saturday May 12th, promotes artists who create in contemporary and innovative modes of expression. PerformIT will feature local and international performance artists who use their bodies and other non-traditional forms of art to address conceptual issues ranging from the political, spiritual, interpersonal, and corporeal.

PerformIT is proud to present our featured artists Joanna Frueh, Elena Tejada-Herrera, and Jo Novelli.

Featured Performance Artist

ELENA TEJADA HERRERA performs
"Gallery Land Security." "La Mona Calentadora"
"Always Up, Beauty Treatment Up and Down"
"What Would It Take for You to Leave Everything Behind"

Elena Tejada-Herrera’s work pushes the boundaries between comfort and community.  Her evocative and strongly visual live art performances challenge the viewer, participant, and bystander to question their behavior with humor and communal interaction. Elena was born in Peru where she studied as a painter and started performing in 1997.  She has represented the country of Peru at the Sao-Paulo-Valencia Biennial and the NIPAF 2007 (Nipon International Performance Art Festival in Tokyo, Nagoya Nagano).  Her work has been included in the encyclopedia of Contemporary Peruvian Art History, in the books “Actionism in Peru”, among others.  She won first prize in “Passport for an Artist” sponsored by the French government, as well as the “art Nexus” scholarship and residency at the Vermont Studio Center, and others in Paris France.

Featured Performance Artist

JO NOVELLI performs
"Fin."

This work concludes a year-long project called 2for1.  “Fin.” is an interactive piece that involves photos from the past, a participant from the present, a postcard for the future and a narrative that that could ravel these events, things and people together.

Jo Novelli was born Patty Blasko in Johnstown Pennsylvania where she graduated from Westmont Hilltop Senior High School.  Jo currently lives in Phoenix where she is writing a dissertation for a PhD in Performance Studies from New York University.  She is exhausted by the task of holding day jobs to finance her performance and scholarly work.

 

#5“Discovering Honesty”
Video Installation by Don Douthitt

The installation, Discovery Honesty, articulates the transformation that took place in the artist’s comprehension of God as he came to understand the strangely complex relationship he has with Him. In this piece, sensors in the kneeler respond to biorhythmic pulses released from the participant’s body. These pulses activate the video images and audio. In this way, Discovering Honesty offers the viewer the opportunity to participate and connect with the artist’s personal imagery through the viewer’s physical presence.

Don Douthitt is a proud Oklahoman/Texan making art about his Christian
experience in contrast to Bible-belt theology. He is currently combining and developing his Computer Science and Graphic Design skills from Texas A&M University-Commerce to complete a Digital Arts MFA at The University of Arizona

Featured Performance Artist

JOANNA FRUEH performs "Shaking Out the Dead"
at the Historic Y, 4:00-5:00 p.m. on May 12th

Frueh is an art critic and art historian, a writer, an actress, a singer, and multidisciplinary performance artist. Her most recent book is
Swooning Beauty: A Memoir of Pleasure (2006). There her trailblazing consciousness continues the exploration of love, eros, sex, and human relations that appear in her previous books, Monster/Beauty: Building the Body of Love (2001) and Erotic Faculties (1996). Clairvoyance (For Those In The Desert): Performance Pieces 1979-2004, a collection of her essential performance texts, will be published by Duke University Press in December 2007. Frueh’s performance texts and her writings on contemporary art and women artists have appeared in numerous books and journals. Recognized as a powerful, provocative, and articulate performer, she has presented her one-woman shows—as well as lectures—at museums, galleries, universities, and conferences in the United States, Canada, Australia, and the UK. Frueh is Distinguished Professor in the School of Art at the University of Arizona and Professor Emerita of Art History at the University of Nevada, Reno. 

 

 

#4"Molotov Cocktail Party: Peace is Da Bomb"

Tableau de Vivant by Colleena Cardelabra: Suicide Bombshell, Heidi MacDonald: Mother Of All Bombs (M.O.A.B.), & Johnboy Reidy: The Warhead

Three personified bombs sipping Molotov cocktails and eating Improvised Evolutionary Devices (I.E.D.) as appetizers.

 

 

#6 "The Work Before Being"
Performance by Karyn Hunt

Karyn Hunt’s durational piece explores the limits of the body and mind in “The Work Before Being”. The small desk with a pad of paper, a pen, and a bowl of white balloons becomes a controlled environment that invites inevitable failure.

Karyn Hunt spent her early years in Fallon, Nevada, a desert oasis saturated with methamphetamine, abuse, and neglect. As a child, she played in abandoned trailers with their discontinued calendars and frozen clocks, collecting the waste from the previous tenants. Influenced by the godless landscapes she emerged from, but no longer wanting to inhabit them, she ran away to scenic Portland, Oregon where she received her BFA in Printmaking from the Pacific Northwest College of Art. Alas, the desert called her name and Karyn relocated to Tucson, Arizona where she is currently working on her MFA in Printmaking.

#8”Untitled”
Drawing installation by Danny Martin

Danny Martin was born in Birmingham, Alabama, and has spent most of his life within one hour of the greater Birmingham area, though temporarily living in Tucson, Arizona for Graduate School. He has worked as a stock boy, a furniture mover, and a tombstone designer.

#9“Tampon Torpedo Submarine” & “ Hanging concrete Blocks”
Installation by Hilary Meehan

Hilary’s humorous play with imagery asks the viewer to reexamine objects that have taken a permanent seat in our environment. The absurd combination of a submarine with a tampon as a torpedo blends two hyper gender specific tools and provokes the viewer to question their comfort levels.

Hilary Meehan is currently working in Tucson, Arizona. Her work has been shown across the country and internationally. She works with drawings that are culled from her everyday life. The drawings are the vehicle for sharing insights, humor, hope, and joy; these drawings take the form of large scale works on walls, ceilings, paper, wood, and, occassionally, objects. Hilary was recently chosen to create one of six Govenor's Arts Awards for the state of Arizona. She is currently part of the curated online artist registry, White Columns. Her work is in the permanent collections of Cranbrook Art Museum, The Art Institure of Chicago, and the Museum of Contemporary Art Tucson. Hilary has received an MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art, and a BED from Miami University. She says, "Trust yourself and enjoy".

#10“The Collective”
Dac McCabe

The Collective is an interactive documentary dealing with universal archetypes and the network of universal unconscious social relationships. Fifteen people all of which are linked to my personal relationships to varying degrees were asked to respond to five archetypal topics, Divinity, Family, Feminine, Masculine, and Violence. The viewer is allowed to navigate freely through the project, and must actively engage the interface in order to view the entire piece. The Collective creates an environment in which each viewer can generate their own narrative from the piece, and also grasp the commonality of thought among people from a wide range of backgrounds.

#11 “The X and the O”
Collaborative installation by Eliane Paulino, Gary Hudman electrical engineer, & Alejandro Perez Digital Art graduate student

The interactive installation uses the game ‘tic tac toe’ to create a phenomenological experience for the viewer as artist. She combines technology by embedding sensors in the game pieces that trigger a computer to process different imagery. Her installation calls to question the dichotomies between work and play, technology and art.

A native Brazilian who moved to Europe at the age of twenty-one specifically to study art. Elaine attended the Maastricht Academy in The Netherlands and the Düsseldorf Academy of Art in Germany. In addition, she studied sculpture and performance art at the Düsseldorf Academy of Art under internationally known artist Klaus Rinke and received her Diploma Letter in 2002. Since 2004, Eliane has attended the School of Art at The University of Arizona as a non-degree graduate student.

#14 “The Borrowed Garden”
Heather Anne Baldwin

The artist has removed pieces of plants from their original commercial and retail landscape, to subvert their role as mere decorative objects for consumers. In her studio, Heather has grown the cuttings into genetic clones of the mature plant. She will give the newly propagated plants to participants. By sharing this project with the community the plants are allowed to live symbiotically with human culture rather than being commodified under it.

Heather is a painter and conceptual artist based in Tucson who houses a variety of practices to explore issues in land use and community development. She graduated with a B.A. in Studio Art from the University of Arizona.

#12 ”You Can't Even See Me, Can You?”
Installation Performance by Rae Strozzo

Rae Strozzo pouring paint recalls the alpha male “Pollockian” performance with a cathartic coating of his own portraits. Rae questions the constructed notions of gender and the inability to separate one’s self from the misconception of others.

Rae Strozzo is pursuing his MFA in Photography at the University of Arizona. He received a B.A in English and philosophy at Georgia Southern University in 1997. He completed coursework for a M.A. in English at Georgia Southern University in 2005. He has also worked in and completed coursework in graphic design. Currently the focus of his work is on addressing the experience of being transgendered in American society in terms of day to day living and in issues of family and communication.

#15 "An Exorcism from Bureaucracy"
Performance by Jorge Porrata

Originally from Cuba, Jorge Porrata questions the process of immigration and the identity of self through endless bureaucratic paperwork. The methodological acts that compose this piece deepen with the duration moving towards a ritualistic cleansing of the frustration brought forth by nonhuman contact. Jorge invites viewers to take part in this symbolic purification by shredding papers and washing stamps from his body.

#16 "Strange Attractor I"
Video Installation by Timur Siqin and Brook Jonquil

Our video is an attempt to combin fragmented narrative contexts into one narrative, scalar, iteration of a larger fractal meta-narrative.  Paths, loops and overlaid perspectives and sudden shifts of narrative context are employed to model our experience, understanding and hunches about the nature of reality.

The final video is a manifestation of our memory of creating the piece.  In this sense, the piece is a sort of planned memory or mnemonic future—a ritual perhaps.

#13 “Gumball Machine ”
Interactive Installation by Alan Skees

Currently his work explores ideas of data collection, communication, and social structures. The piece “Gumball Machine” consists of a gumball/capsule machine filled with capsules that dispenses small prints for 50 cents.

Alan Skees was born and raised in Birmingham, Alabama and received his BFA from the University of Alabama at Birmingham in 2004. He is currently completing his MFA at the University of Arizona. He teaches 2-D color and design at the University of Arizona and has exhibited work internationally.

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Selections from Voyeur Collective
www.voyeurcollective.com

Monique Malone / Australia
Intrinsic 3’57min 2006

Robert Hecimovic / Australia
Japan 4’39min 2006-07

James Bryans / Australia
Those people down there look like ants… 3’06min 2005

Kim Collmer / Germany
Silver Seeds 9’13min 2005

Shannon Carpenter / USA
Spotlight 2’06min 2003

Barbara Agreste / Italy
The Chequered Tunnel 5’05min 2005

Lauren Olney / Australia
Circle 9’10min 2005

Sarah Lynch / Australia
Sweetiepie 3’45min 2002

Marian Tubbs / Australia
Definition of a film 3’00min 2005

Flavia Caviezel / Switzerland
So close so far away 4’00min 2002-03

Erica Eyres / Scotland
Destiny Green 7’28min 2006

Anina Schenker / Switzerland
Gotten out of the air 1’47min 2003

Buckius & Manos / USA
101 Ways to Humanize Technology 3’11min 2007

Alex Staiger / England
Artless formless 3’15min 2006

Christoph Oertli / Switzerland
Come, heavy sleep 7’40min 2004

Ulrika Holmlund / Australia
It’s like I speak another language 3’50min 2005