Killing Time

KILLING TIME, curated by Paul Ha

Killing Time presents six artists who execute performances without the presence of a live audience. Sometimes spontaneous, sometimes meticulously planned, these performances/rituals/ceremonies are created during private sessions in the studio or the home. Killing Time exhibits documentation of, and remnants from, these productions: photographs, video, sets, and props, allowing us a peek into the worlds the artists create while alone.

Performance art has an automatic and implicit connection to an audience. Whether interacting with or ignoring those present, the artist is unavoidably aware that he/she is being observed. The artists in Killing Time have chosen performance as their media, but have eliminated such an immediate response. They are less concerned with retort and approval than with the effort involved in creating and performing an act, and its effect on themselves. Often the documentation exists so that the artists can critically study their own actions, and as a means to experiment and work through ideas.

Inspired by the bright white T-shirts of the kids in her neighborhood, Katrin Asbury distributes bleached fabric and relates it to the stars in the cosmos; Dexter Buell creates a life-size habitrail in his studio and videotapes himself struggling to run inside it; Charles Goldman shows videos of the interior perimeter of both the house where he grew up and his current residence, each shot 3 inches from the wall; Lucy Gunning performs The Headstand; Ellie Murphy builds herself a stage sufficiently glamorous for watching the Academy Awards on TV; Craig Smith gives a literal and physical interpretation of the attempt to elevate one’s status through books.