Slow Dance | Performances
Slow Dance features artists who use performance to reclaim forms of slowness that resist the contemporary demand to constantly perform. In-gallery performance activations take place throughout the run of the show.
Spanning sculpture, performance, and the moving image, Slow Dance brings together six multidisciplinary artists who reclaim forms of slowness that resist the pressure to constantly perform. Amid failure, breakdown, or exhaustion, their works return attention to the body and the leaky, porous conditions of living that escape easy measurement.
Featured throughout the run of the exhibition are in-gallery performance activations that transform the gallery spaces and invite new perspectives on the works on view. As such, each experience of the show is slightly different. The exhibition invites audiences to slow down, take in moments of action, witness periods of suspension, and anticipate what is yet to come.
This exhibition is curated by Jadine Collingwood, Pamela Alper Associate Curator, with Korina Hernandez, Curatorial Assistant. It features artworks by Brendan Fernandes, Gordon Hall, Geumhyung Jeong, Carolyn Lazard, Melanie McLain, and Cally Spooner.
About the Performances
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With Inaction, Brendan Fernandes considers how we learn to move—both physically and politically—through the built environment. Exploring how we act, what enables action, and what hinders it, dancers explore different forms of assembly and disassembly: joining hands in a circle, triumphantly climbing a sculpture, or separating to stand in static tableaux.
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In Hands and Knees, Gordon Hall upends the function of a familiar object of waiting: the chair. During live performances, reclining bodies are carried through the gallery on gurney-like sculptures that are placed to rest atop pairs of chairs.
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Geumhyung Jeong presents an in-gallery performance of Making Show, in which the artist attempts to recreate an existing robot in front of a live audience. Much like a cooking show, certain steps are prepared in advance, conveying a sense of efficiency and polish that belies the messier and clumsier labor involved in producing the work.
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Taking its title from a term used in neuroscience, Peripersonal refers to the zone of space immediately surrounding one’s body. In performances, the wall-like partitions of Peripersonal separate two dancers who improvise their movements in response to one another and to the limits imposed by the surrounding structure.
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In Warm Up, a dancer stretches and prepares for a performance that never takes place. Suspended in a state of continuous rehearsal, the work captures the incessant need to always be ready.
Upcoming Performances
Funding
Lead support for Slow Dance is provided by the Harris Family Foundation in memory of Bette and Neison Harris, the Zell Family Foundation, Cari and Michael Sacks, and R. H. Defares.
Major support is provided by Laura and Tony Davis and Linden Capital Partners, Robin Loewenberg Tebbe and Mark Tebbe, and Charlotte R. Cramer Wagner and Herbert S. Wagner III of Wagner Foundation.
Generous support is provided by the Margot and W. George Greig Ascendant Artist Fund.
This exhibition is supported by the MCA’s Women Artists Initiative, a philanthropic commitment to further equity across gender lines and promote the work and ideas of women artists.
