Public Opening Night

A special evening program with live performances, as part of the Public sector. Curated by Nicholas Baume, Director & Chief Curator of Public Art Fund, New York. Produced in collaboration with the Bass Museum of Art.

Artist Performances:

Alix Pearlstein | The Shining (2014)
A set of actors equipped with personal illumination panels circulate amongst the crowd. At recurring intervals, they assemble as a group, turning their lights away from themselves to cast a fleeting glow onto various artworks or other objects. Existing between the fabric of exhibition and celebration, this performance seeks to evoke an affective response to the site, the exhibition and the evening’s festivities.

Liz Glynn & Dawn Kasper | cosmo[il]logical (2014)
The Collins Park Rotunda is transformed into a geodesic planetarium, animated with projected celestial images and pulsing with light and sound. The artists, embodying matter and anti-matter, dictate their trajectories around the space while delivering fragmentary chunks of text, action and processed sound. Interacting with each other, as well as the audience and environment, the artists explore how we locate ourselves within the vast universe of seen and unseen forces.

Ryan Gander | Thank you, but I am promised to the company of my artist this evening (2014)
Two armed bodyguards follow Nicholas Baume, curator of the Public sector, as he goes about his business during the opening. The bodyguards are not actors or performers in a role, but actual bodyguards paid to protect the curator in a very public situation, heightening his visibility and actions. The curator becomes the performer, or the spectacle; the bodyguards become devices to facilitate that spectacle. And for a moment, the performer and the facilitator become seamlessly merged.

Christian Falsnaes | Front (2014)
A participatory performance in which a large-scale structure is continuously spray painted, torn down, paraded around and subsequently rebuilt into new forms. Through his instructions to the viewers, the artist takes on the role of director, dissolving the aesthetic boundary between the stage and the audience, who is invited to participate in the creation of the work. The resulting sculpture is a collective piece, which remains at its place of origin as a document of the collective performance.