Performance at The Re Institute, Millerton, NY, July 2023; exhibition/installation on view July-September 2023

BAN, a live performance and installation, responds to current legal restrictions that violate human dignity and self-determination. Key supreme court decisions that establish or undermine civil liberties are projected throughout the installation, but these texts have been layered and obscured in ways that render them unstable. BAN employs protest, subversion and witchcraft to conflate the messages of those who wield judgment and the necessity of intervention by those excluded from traditional roles of power.

Digital prints use dissenting opinions from Supreme Court decisions that have been formatted to emphasize the impact and incoherency of court text and decisions.

Performance for Convoy, presented by the Los Angeles- based High Beams collective.
Rocky Mountain College of Art & Design, Denver, CO, August 2022

Some throwbacks to 1973, the year of the original Roe v. Wade decision:

• a ’73 Buick Wildcat (gold)

• vintage 1970’s swimsuits

• a soundtrack blasting from the car stereo, featuring 1973 hits like Cum on Feel the Noize, The Morning After, Touch Me In the Morning and Dark Side of the Moon.

Carrying posterboard signs advertising ‘state line car wash- $500 + travel’ and ‘MY CAR MY WASH,’ this work invoked an era when teenage girls in swimsuits regularly held car wash fundraisers to raise money for school and church functions, and when access to safe, legal abortion was still guaranteed to all women in America.

“Isn’t she a beauty? Don’t touch the chrome.”

Performance and solo exhibit.
Art Palace, Houston, TX, September 2015

Performance with The Trailer.
Prospect Biennial 3+, satellite venue programming presented by Press Street, New Orleans, LA, October 2014

Solo exhibit with performance and installation.
Box 13 ArtSpace, Houston, TX, March 2013

Inheritance was an accumulative exhibition and live performance featuring the simple, domestic act of washing dinnerware. In its initial state, the installation featured the spare arrangement of fragile, unfired porcelain dinnerware, awaiting activation through use. Midway through the exhibition, the performance activated and transformed these objects, and by the exhibit’s close, the installation consisted merely of residues. The work’s title, Inheritance, refers to the physical and emotional belongings, expectations and legacies that are passed down between generations.

Solo exhibit with performance & installation.
Art Palace Gallery, Houston, TX, August 2012
Re-performed for Currents International New Media Festival, Santa Fe, NM, June 2013

Medium featured four performers seated on chairs suspended from the gallery walls at a height just above viewers’ heads. From their respective seats, each performer interacted with or responded to a combination of objects, video projection, reflected light and sound. The work’s title refers both to the collection and dissemination of other-worldly messages and to the materials from which artworks are created. This work invokes the intentional, wondrous and quasi-religious aspects of both art making and seeking the divine.

Sequence of two performances with The Trailer, presented by Wichita State University [1 of 2].
WSU Shift Space, Wichita, KS, April 2014

‘Warning Signs’ included performances and public interactions supported in part by an Artistic Innovations award from Mid-America Arts Alliance, the National Endowment for the Arts, Texas Commission on the Arts, and foundations, corporations and individuals throughout Arkansas, Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska, Oklahoma and Texas.

Sequence of two performances with The Trailer, presented by Wichita State University [2 of 2].
Ulrich Museum of Art, Wichita, KS, April 2014

‘Warning Signs’ included performances and public interactions supported in part by an Artistic Innovations award from Mid-America Arts Alliance, the National Endowment for the Arts, Texas Commission on the Arts, and foundations, corporations and individuals throughout Arkansas, Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska, Oklahoma and Texas.

Performance, commissioned by Flux Projects for Flux Night 2012.
Castleberry Hill Arts District, Atlanta, GA, October 2012

Loose Snare was a three hour live performance in Atlanta’s Castleberry Hill neighborhood for Flux Night, during which The Bridge Club moved throughout a gathered crowd of over 12,000 event attendees. Each performer carried a ladder and a Victorian-style ‘ear trumpet,’ used to visually communicate a physical effort to hear something ephemeral over the din of the crowd. Audio broadcast from each performer’s body prompted viewers to also listen. The four performers repeatedly disbanded and converged, at times aligning strangers or fracturing existing groups within the audience. This work investigated the nature of both shared and isolated experience within a crowd.

Performance commissioned by/presented at Museum of Contemporary Art, Santa Barbara, CA, February 2014

Plan featured the four artist-performers of The Bridge Club collaborative engaged in processing a never-ending blueprint loop through a modified laundry wringer. One performer, wearing blinders as might be placed on a horse to keep it calm, sees only the plan. Two others alternately engage with ephemeral video scenes projected onto the walls and onto their own bodies via the fourth performer’s hat. This work references plan-making as an act of both hope and futility, while the physical document of the blueprint alludes to the ways that plans get derailed, remade or destroyed— physically, emotionally, psychologically or historically.

Installation and sequence of three performances with The Trailer [1 of 3].
New Genre Arts Festival XXI, Living Arts, Tulsa, OK, February-March 2014

‘Colony’ included performances and public interactions supported in part by an Artistic Innovations award from Mid-America Arts Alliance, the National Endowment for the Arts, Texas Commission on the Arts, and foundations, corporations and individuals throughout Arkansas, Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska, Oklahoma and Texas.

Installation and sequence of three performances with The Trailer [2 of 3].
New Genre Arts Festival XXI, Living Arts, Tulsa, OK, February-March 2014

‘Colony’ included performances and public interactions supported in part by an Artistic Innovations award from Mid-America Arts Alliance, the National Endowment for the Arts, Texas Commission on the Arts, and foundations, corporations and individuals throughout Arkansas, Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska, Oklahoma and Texas.

Installation and sequence of three performances with The Trailer [3 of 3].
New Genre Arts Festival XXI, Living Arts, Tulsa, OK, February-March 2014

‘Colony’ included performances and public interactions supported in part by an Artistic Innovations award from Mid-America Arts Alliance, the National Endowment for the Arts, Texas Commission on the Arts, and foundations, corporations and individuals throughout Arkansas, Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska, Oklahoma and Texas.

Performance with The Trailer.
Ohio University, Athens, OH, April 2015

Solo exhibition with installation and performance.
Lawndale Art Center, Houston, TX, January 2011

Performance actions involved clinical, domestic or scientific ‘resource workers’ selecting objects from piles of everyday materials; processing each in one of two ‘natural’ substances: oil or milk; and placing the objects into a series of glass jars. A material transformation took place over the course of the exhibit, as the milk began to rot and oil to pool and saturate.

Performance.
The Nerve Performance Art Festival, Ft. Lauderdale, FL, March 2017

Performance with The Trailer.
Lawndale Art Center, Houston, TX, March 2013

What Remains, the inaugural live performance with The Trailer project, saw The Bridge Club methodically handling a variety of animal figurines, presumably contributed to the project by audience members. Each figurine was treated with a visible level of care before being quickly and violently destroyed with a shovel. The remains of each figurine were then buried in the adjacent sculpture garden’s lawn, acknowledging its characteristic presentation of art objects by positioning another variety of art object out of view.

Performance with The Trailer, presented as part of the Texas Biennial 2013.
Blue Star Contemporary Art Museum, San Antonio, TX, September 2013

‘Waltz Across Texas’ included performances and public interactions in several Texas cities, supported in part by an Artistic Innovations award from Mid-America Arts Alliance, the National Endowment for the Arts, Texas Commission on the Arts, and foundations, corporations and individuals throughout Arkansas, Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska, Oklahoma and Texas.

Digital image sequence for the Billboard Art Project.
Roadside LED billboard on Peachtree Road, Atlanta, GA, September-October 2012

Throughout September and October, a sequential series of digital images created by The Bridge Club for the Billboard Art Project was displayed on a roadside LED billboard above a gas station parking lot in Atlanta, GA. This work, with text pulled from vintage advertising campaigns, explored the intersections of art, commerce, theatricality and presentation. Also included in Color Shift, an exhibit for the Billboard Art Project curated by Katerina Lanfranco.

Mobile installation and touring series of live performance works; 2013 – ongoing

The Trailer, an ongoing project of The Bridge Club collaborative, is an installation and series of live performance works centered around and inside of a vintage camping trailer. The Trailer operates, at different and overlapping times, as a mobile art installation offering ‘evidence’ of routes traveled, people encountered, and places experienced along the way; as a set and prop for live performances by The Bridge Club; and as an ‘archiving unit,’ in which we devise a variety of means of collecting visitors’ own histories, memories and experiences to be incorporated into the larger project. Each live performance with The Trailer is an entirely new, distinct site-specific work both planned according to its particular context and shaped unpredictably by the responses of its audience.

Performance commissioned for Dwell, a series of live outdoor works.
Contemporary Artists Center, Troy, NY, August 2011

Oculus, a live performance work and resulting temporary landscape installation, used repetition and ritual enacted over time to explore themes of women’s work and the condition of anonymity within the industrial landscape of Troy, NY. The performance action paced the intricate shape of the neighboring church’s rose window into a 40 foot pattern etched into the hillside.

Solo exhibit with installation and performance.
621 Gallery, Tallahassee, FL, March 2011

Shell investigated the boundaries between physical and psychological space as well as between performer and spectator. The focus of the installation was a stick-framed box or room, skinned in a translucent fabric and covered on two sides with video projections. The live performance took place inside of this box, with light from the projections passing through the walls and onto the performers’ bodies. Through their shadows, both the performers and visitors to the gallery became implicated in the projections’ ominous landscape.

Site-specific performance for Off the Strip New Genres Festival, Contemporary Arts Center, Las Vegas, NV
Performance took place at the Don’t Tell Mama piano bar, downtown Las Vegas/ Fremont Street, October 2010

Music Box was a one-night live performance on the streets of downtown Las Vegas and inside of a classic Las Vegas piano bar. Performance actions were markedly slowed, in stark contrast to the pace of the surrounding environment, while speakers hidden on each performer’s body played a slow, faint recording from a vintage music box— frequently overshadowed by competing external sounds.

Live performance & video work broadcast live via the internet and projected in real time at venues across the U.S., as part of the Low Lives 2 exhibit curated by Jorge Rojas. April 30, 2010

Torrent Echo featured one live performer interacting with projected footage of three other performers. This layering mirrored the audience’s experience in the gallery during the Low Lives event, where live viewers encountered live video feeds but were unable to interact directly with the performers.

Live projection at El Museo del Barrio, NYC; Galeria de la Raza, San Francisco, CA; Diaspora Vibe, Miami, FL; The Temporary Space, Houston, TX; Obsidian Arts, Minneapolis, MN; Terminal, Clarksville, TN; Co-Lab, Austin, TX; & Studio 304, Brooklyn, NY

Hotel room installation, video work, and multi-day live performance, commissioned by the Visual Artists Network for the National Performance Network’s 2009 Annual Meeting.
Knoxville Hilton, Knoxville, TN, December 2009

During each performance, one member of The Bridge Club embodied the characteristics of a typical hotel room inhabitant, while each of the other members sat in an idle trance. The room’s television, featuring a loop of prerecorded programming, signaled a periodic role change. When a live performance was not taking place, four video projections timed to play on cue cast moving images of the room’s inhabitants on the bathroom wall, bed, desk, and seating area, appearing as ghostlike apparitions.

Solo exhibit with performance, installation and video.
1708 Gallery, Richmond, VA, July 2009

The Observation Room featured four related components: an arranged display of objects and artifacts akin to those found in a history museum; a built room containing a series of domestic spatial vignettes; a one-night performance calling to mind the fictitious historical reenactment found at a ‘living history’ attraction; and a video depicting the physical use of historic objects, preserving their functions in a familiar documentary fashion. This work emphasized the collection and preservation of art and objects, pointing to the viewer’s complicity in designations of value and constructions of narrative.

Site-specific installation with performative video work projected at a second site, created for Center to Edge: the 2008 River City Biennale, Wichita, KS, May 2008

Front Window took form in two distinct locations: an installation in the street-level window of a downtown storefront, and a video projected in a traditional gallery context. The installation visually aimed to blend in with its surrounding environment, taking the shape of a once-vibrant commercial space that had been left to sit empty. The video activated the space of the installation, creating a reciprocal relationship in the viewer’s memory that shifted depending on which site the viewer had visited first.

Digital/ web-based performative work and installation incorporating web-based video feed.
Web-based work launched Valentine’s Day 2008 at www.resistlooking.net (no longer active)

Domestic Surveillance, both a temporary installation and an ongoing web-based project, examines the distinctions between virtual space and physical space, and investigates cyberspace as a relational forum where multiple spaces and times, both real and imagined, coexist. Domestic Surveillance acknowledges the inherent, uncomfortable eroticism in both watching the unsuspecting and in the possibility of being watched, and invokes themes of voyeurism, captivity, aggression, and visual power.

Performance.
Wappingers Falls, NY, July 2007

Abject Ritual featured four identically clad women working intently, but without clear objective, in an above-ground swimming pool. Ritual is often laced with unease; its lack of self-intuiting logic can be unsettling. A detached observer might find the same uncertainty accompanying a variety of known ritual events—baptisms, communions, weddings, and prostrations all rely upon a shared narrative symbolism that requires outside or originative explanation.

Performance.
Beacon, NY, July 2007

The Voyage Out, a site-specific performance on New York’s Hudson River, addressed historical narratives of travel, exploration and adventure and the role that gender has traditionally played within such narratives. The women’s exploratory actions in this performance returned repeatedly to the shore, thereby also invoking comfort, security, and domestic routine.

Performance.
Steelworks Museum of Industry & Culture/ Colorado Fuel & Iron Company’s former administration building, Pueblo, CO, September 2006

Shift Work involved four women sitting silently around a table, each sipping from a teacup filled with coal ore dust. It was unclear whether the women were at work themselves, were waiting for a spouse or loved one to return from the day’s work, or a combination thereof. Shift Work thus subtly investigated the contradictory role of work in a family relationship and the roles of gender in traditional labor.

Covert performance.
Norlin Library, Boulder, CO, May 2005

Landscape-responsive performance action.
Mead, CO, August 2005

Public performance.
Evergreen Launderette, Boulder, CO, March 2005

Public performance on a commuter bus.
Boulder, CO, January 2005

Performance and subsequent video work.
Boulder, CO, November 2004

Postcard series, 2006-present