HIJACK (Van Loon + Wilder) + Eckwall + Fontaine
present
JEALOUSY
at
HAIR + NAILS Contemporary Art Gallery
2222 ½ E. 35th St. Minneapolis, MN 55407
4 shows only. Limited capacity:
Friday, July 12, 2019 8:00pm
Saturday, July 13, 2019 6:00pm
Saturday, July 13, 2019 8:00pm
Sunday, July 14, 2019 8:00pm
Tickets: $12: reservations at www.hairandnailsart.com; no-one-turned-away-for-lack-of-funds available at the door
Announcing the premiere of JEALOUSY, a dance/sculpture/light performance made site-specifically for theHAIR+NAILS storefront and spilling out into the sculpture garden.
Dance duo HIJACK (Kristin Van Loon & Arwen Wilder) and Lighting Designer Heidi Eckwall and Visual Artist Ryan Fontaine join forces to build a new performance piece. This new work fuses visual and performing arts disciplines with all aspects leading. Our collaboration breaks with the typical hierarchy in theater-making where so often a choreographer gets a gig and feeds lighting and set designers requests and parameters to flatter the dance. JEALOUSY is the collision and confluence of the four artists’ impulses: HIJACK makes ephemeral work, are obsessively frugal and any materials/props are made of used objects following the environmental edict: leave no traces. Their dances invite audiences to speculate about relationship and imagine non-linear narrative meaning. Fontaine’s work is abstract, concerned with color and form, is often made of toxic resins and leaves large objects in the world. HIJACK likes to make an audience choose what is important and where to look. Heidi’s signature lighting design is very precise specific direction of the eye. These apparent conflicts set the stage for rich collaboration and a thick, important performance.
In JEALOUSY, Fontaine builds a packing-tape-walled room-in-a-room and manipulated video–feeds into the basement and back room. Eckwall experiments with rolls and rolls of jellybean–hued dots of lights. Van Loon pokes and kneads Wilder as if she were made of clay. Wilder takes 5 minutes to stand up but with no slo-mo.
…In poetic terms:
This piece will turn you into the old man who watches the security camera behind his garage suspecting everyone who walks through the alley. Like any wall, the dance goes up and down, but not without consequence. If walls had eyes, if walls could talk…This dance is held together with packing tape, the set held together with packing tape, the lights are taped on, the lighting designer is pretending to be a documentarian. It is criminal within and criminal without. The whole situation is precarious and non-biodegradable. The dancers are your secret pot plant under a grow-light. You will covet your neighbor’s view.
…In plain terms:
Audiences can expect a strolling performance experience under an hour in duration. Receptions in the backyard sculpture garden to follow each performance. An artist conversation will be held in the garden a week after the performance and the artists will self-publish a print zine/catalog with commissioned writings about the work.
As an artist-run space co-directed by a visual artist and a choreographer, HAIR+NAILS Gallery cultivates projects at the intersection of disciplines. In the “off season” the gallerists offer up the storefront and backyard sculpture garden for artist creation residencies. In summer of 2019 they round out their 3rd season of programming with the creation and premiere of JEALOUSY with collaborators Arwen Wilder and Heidi Eckwall.
…Funding credit:
Arwen Wilder is a fiscal year 2019 recipient of an Artist Initiative grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board. This activity is made possible by the voters of Minnesota through a grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the arts and cultural heritage fund.
ARTIST BIOS:
HIJACK is the Minneapolis-based choreographic collaboration of Kristin Van Loon and Arwen Wilder. Over the last 26 years they have created over 100 dances and performed in venues ranging from proscenium to barely-legal. HIJACK manipulates context by employing a site-specific approach to every performance and toying with audiences’ expectations. HIJACK has performed in New York (at DTW, PS122, HERE ArtCenter, Catch/Movement Research Festival, La Mama, Dixon Place, Chocolate Factory), Japan, Russia, Central America, Ottawa, Chicago, Colorado, New Orleans, Seattle, Philadelphia, San Francisco, at Fuse Box Festival in Austin Texas, and Bates Dance Festival in Maine and Seattle Festival of Dance Improvisation. In 2013, Walker Art Center commissioned “redundant, ready, reading, radish, Red Eye” to celebrate twenty years of HIJACK and Contact Quarterly published the chapbook “Passing for Dance: A HIJACK Reader”.
Heidi Eckwall designs lighting for dance, theater and performance. Sometimes she tours in the US and abroad, sometimes she works and teaches at Colorado College, sometimes she works biking distance from the house she shares with Arwen Wilder and their two children. Recent projects include #PUNK100%POP*N!GGA with Nora Chipaumire, Birds of the Future with Charles Campbell and Momentum: New Dance Works (J. H. Shui Xiān, Herbert Johnson III, Leslie Parker, Jonathan van Arneman).
Ryan Fontaine is a visual artist, musician, and co–director of HAIRandNAILS Contemporary Art. Ryan makes paintings, sculptures and multi-media installations using a wide range of materials, synthetic/industrial as well as natural, including living plants. The work is primarily concerned with the relationship between object and information. www.ryanfontaine.com
HAIR+NAILS is a contemporary art gallery located in the Corcoran neighborhood of South Minneapolis. Founded and operated by artist/musician RYAN FONTAINE & dancer/choreographer KRISTIN VAN LOON in 2016, H+N is dedicated to exhibiting compelling and thought–provoking visual art and occasional performance with an emphasis on dance.
ALSO, PLEASE JOIN US THURSDAY, MAY 16th at the Walker Art Center for a screening of two films by Sullivan and a discussion moderated by Ryan Fontaine, codirector of the Minneapolis artist-run space Hair + Nails.
Little Hunt (2002)
15:30 min
Walker Art Center Collection, Butler Family Fund, 2003
‘Tis a Pity She’s a Fluxus Whore (2003)
20 min
Walker Art Center Collection, T. B. Walker Acquisition Fund, 2005
Presented in collaboration with the Walker Art Center and the opening of Catherine Sullivan: The Startled Faction on May 17.
Friday, May 17th from 7-10pm, HAIR+NAILS is pleased to announce the opening of Catherine Sullivan: The Startled Faction
PLEASE JOIN US THE FOLLOWING EVENING, ON FRIDAY MAY17th, 7-10pm AT HAIRandNAILS, for the opening reception of Catherine Sullivan’s “The Startled Faction”.
Presented as an installation in its native anamorphic format, Sullivan’s 34-minute film The Startled Faction (a sensitivity training) proposes a social space of redress animated through historical and imagined modes of address.
Sullivan states: “The Startled Faction (a sensitivity training) is a propositional film concerned with ambiguous labor (uncompensated work outside one’s job description). The prevailing question for the nine characters in the film is whether to “lean in” to it or resist through strategies of withdrawal, redaction and retreat. With varying degrees of aptitude and motivation, the group rehearses symptoms of and methods for avoiding ambiguous labor including feigned surprise and incompetence, subtle displays of hostility and conspicuous demonstrations of fatigue. They participate in these exercises and in partially reconstructed scenes of resistance drawn from the 1954 film “Salt of the Earth”, a semi-fictional account of a strike at a New Mexico zinc mine. In this film, the lower status and invisibility of the women’s labor is set against the racial and economic urgency of the strike. The group is drawn into this contestation by the film’s soundtrack, and a woman attempting to escape from the task of recounting the experiences of its protagonist. The sensitivity training’s modulating mise en scène hosts a wide range of aesthetic treatments, modes of performance and narrative tangents.
The nine men and women are prompted to find the boundaries of their demands on each other and to redact information when these boundaries are transgressed. Individual motives, awarenesses and psychological and emotional orientations are also implicated in exercises that ask members of the group to identify categorically with circumstances around their race, class and gender. The Startled Faction embodies not only my concern for and interest in social spaces of redress, but also in divergent artistic and discursive lineages such as left-wing dance from the 1930’s, social justice curricula, private testimony and academic sociology. The characters confront the instruments and methods for the expression complaint, anger and suffering in lived and imagined worlds.”
At roughly 34 minutes, the film features nine performers working primarily in Chicago, the film’s shooting location. In addition to cinematographer Raoul Germain, some are long-time collaborators in Sullivan’s film and theater works. Co-produced with Chicago Dancemakers Forum, work on the piece began in late 2016.
About the artist:
Born in 1968 in Los Angeles, Catherine Sullivan creates ensemble work in film, theater and visual art. She is concerned with the ways in which history is projected through the body, and questions of redress in American social life. Performers in her works cope with written texts, stylistic economies, re-enactments of historic performances, gestural and choreographic regimes, and conceptual orthodoxies. Solo exhibitions, collaborations, performances and films have been presented at venues such as Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Tate Monden, London; Secession, Vienna; Cricoteka, Krakow; Volksbühne, Berlin; Berlin International Film Festival and BFI London Film Festival. Gallery exhibitions include Metro Pictures, New York; Galerie Catherine Bastide, Brussels; Galerie Christian Nagel, Cologne and Galeria Gio Marconi, Milan. Her work is held in public and private collections including Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, Vienna; Rubell Family Foundation, Miami and Geotz Collection, Munich. Notable awards include The Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation, Herb Alpert Award in the Arts, Deutscher Akademischer Austausch Dienst, United States Artists Walker Fellowship and a Chicago Dancemakers Forum Lab Artist Award. She holds a BFA in acting from California Institute of the Arts and an MFA in post-studio art from Art Center College of Design. She is an associate professor in the Department of Visual Arts at the University of Chicago.
