Led by Artists Autumn Hays and Sabri Reed
In this performance workshop we will engage in focused exercises in task-based performence and guided reflection about the physicality of the human body. By setting side by side a real interest in the interior knowledge of the human body with a call to attune ourselves to the intimacy of non-human things, we aim to experience a session of embodied research about presence and material vibrancy.

In making art I attempt to compose an experience that shows the viewer psychological and physical distress corporally. It is through this that one can perceive the content, not just observe it. Though often based on my personal body as an archive my art is not there to reflect myself. It is there to propagate the affect formed by the viewer. My artworks are not truly created in the objects and performances I make, but rather it is formed in the moment it reaches the viewer. That reaction is where my artwork exists, never in the piece itself.
My work focuses on the history of mistreatment within various system of otherization including self-created systems. Through performance and social experimentation I wish to examine the magical belief systems created in attempts to fix the other. Furthermore, I wish to perform the archives of these histories giving them physical representation as a form of evidence. It is through an accounting of these actions that we can begin to ask: what actions are we taking today that tomorrow will be seen as maltreatment?

FRIDAY NIGHT LIVE PERFORMANCE: The human body is represented as a cold mechanical machine in modern popular science. This reflection makes evident a certain flaw in our perception of the body and of science. The body is seen as a machine because of our personal goals in promoting the acceptance of the age of mechanical reproduction. Using found language from modern science television including commercials and the marketing of scientific treatments. Specifically one’s that are produced for you for profit. These views of the body promote containing it within the clean and rational objects of science. For my project I wish to engage with pervious work I have done with the found language of popular science, performative lecturing, and my recent research on attempts to define the boundries of the body. We attempt to separate ourselves at our skin. Anything excreted and placed outside the skin become dirty and otherized. The mark of the dirty is there to shame us into a state of directed rationalizations. But what if our bodies didn’t end at our skin but included our traces.

FRIDAY NIGHT LIVE PERFORMANCE: As in reading a novel with multiple protagonists, there is pleasure in fore-seeing how their trajectories intersect, and a pleasure in unexpected collision, a broadening of possibilities. My materials, tools, and objects are the actors, and they are curated from my daily interactions and absurd musings. For me to complete the performance is to navigate these entangled routes of transformations (physical and symbolic) of all of the materials present including my body. To negotiate this live, presents quotidian objects and actions as ripe with politics and magic. The woman who performs is attentive, humble, absorbed in her task, engaged with the other humans in the room, naked, confident, and ambitious. She is not needy. She mumbles. She attempts to change the world in 30 minutes and leaves barefoot with a toolbox.