"Transcendence, Action Art and Gender"
2nd Edition of the International Workshop & Performance of the Silver Spiders
The Silver Spiders project explores the deconstruction with the perspectives of gender within archetypes, prototypes, and stereotypes of women in the History of Art and mass media.
They have explored the implications of engaging with embodied intuitive ways of knowing, in relation to each other and their environment, as well as examining individual and communal capacities for communication. They confronted and examined their perspectives of knowledge and fantasies - to the goal of obtaining collective intercommunications, culminating in the group performance, presented to the public, at Grace Exhibition Space, Manhattan NY.
Conceived/Organized/Curated by Eugenia Chellet & Grace Exhibition Space
Tanya Mars [Canada]
Irma Optimist [Finland]
Susan Plum [USA]
Rosella Matamoros [Costa Rica]
Eugenia Chellet [Mexico]
2nd edition of the International Workshop & Performance of the Silver Spiders: with a lifetime of experience the artists gathered in Upstate NY and created work together.
TANYA MARS [CANADA]
is a feminist performance artist who has been involved in the Canadian art scene since 1973.
In the 70s and 80s Mars’ work focused on creating spectacular feminist imagery that placed women at the centre of the narrative. Since the mid-90s her performances have included endurance, durational and site-specific strategies. Her work is political, satrical and humorous. She has worked both independently and collaboratively to create both large-scale as well as intimate performances.
She was a founding member and director of Powerhouse Gallery (La Centrale) in Montreal (the first women’s art gallery in Canada), editor of Parallelogramme magazine for 13 years, and very active in ANNPAC (the Association of National Non-Profit Artist-run Centres) for 15 years. She has performed widely across Canada, as well as internationally in Europe and Asia. She is co-editor with Johanna Householder of Caught in the Act: an anthology of performance art by Canadian women (2004) and More Caught in the Act (Artexte:YYZ, 2016). In addition, a book on her work published by FADO and edited by Paul Couillard, Ironic to Iconic: The Performance Works of Tanya Mars, was published in 2008. She is the recipient of a 2008 Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts. She currently teaches performance art and video at the University of Toronto Scarborough. She has been a member of the 7a*11d collective since 1998.
Each summer she spends as much time as she can on the South Shore of Nova Scotia, off the grid.
IRMA OPTIMIST [FINLAND]
Mathematician Irma Optimist started doing performance art in 1989. Since then she has performed at dozens of festivals, museums and galleries all over the world. During the beginning of her career, she was famous for the ironic and parodying aspects of her performances. These were directed as criticism of the prevalent masculine concept of art. Many of the works were interactive and simultaneous, based on mathematical dynamics of chaos.
In most of her work, Irma Optimist has been very personal, discussing the conditions of identity, femininity, death. Gender, locality and nature have been her themes. The works themselves are transformations, in which the existence of the artist is connected to ritual and live installation.
Irma Optimist has also acted as a curator and brought many well-known international performance artists to events she has organised in Finland. Since 2000, she has been involved in organising Là-bas, a permanent forum for living art and experimental culture. This project has succeeded in realising the ideas of contemporary theory concerning non-hierarchical strategies of organisation and rhizome-like networks. The forum continues to operate as a situation-specific and site-specific continuum both in Finland and internationally. The experimental space Studio Là-bas is located at Cable Factory, Helsinki.
Irma Optimist has got in Finland 2012 the Lifetime Achievement Award of Finnish Art Society and 2013 the State Prize of Art.
SUSAN PLUM [USA]
is a mixed-media artist, working primarily in glass. Born in Houston, TX and growing up in Mexico City, Plum was influenced by Magical Realism, which has remained an important theme in her work to this day. Using the technique of flame working, Plum is able to ‘draw’ spatially with glass, weaving delicate and intricate structures.
“I consider glass an ‘element,’” she has explained. “According to Jung, glass represents the ethereal or spiritual, and is like solidified water or air, synonymous with spirit. In my work, glass represents Spirit, Wind, Water, and Sound.” Plum has taught extensively at the Penland School of Crafts, the Corning Museum of Glass Studio, and Urban Glass. Her work is collected by the Hunter Art Museum, Smithsonian Institute, and the Corning Museum of Glass, among others. She has been exhibited by Deborah Colton Gallery, The Frost Art Museum, the National Museum of Lima, the Museo Universitario del Chopo, and many others. - artnet.com
ROSELLA MATAMOROS [COSTA RICA]
The work of Matamoros revolves around the concept of stroke and line in movement. Through various means such as painting, drawing installation, dramaturgy of dress, scenography, video art etc., she has developed different characters, environments and symbols that are based on research in the fields of sociology, psychology and arts on stage.
Matamoros´ work has been exhibited individually and collectively nationally and internationally since 1980.
EUGENIA CHELLET [MEXICO]
was born in Mexico City in 1948. Chellet is a multidisciplinary artist working in performance, photocollage, video art, objects, and installation art. Her work centers on self-portraiture and explores how women throughout the history of art and popular culture—such as cartoons, pinups, fotonovelas, and advertising—have been celebrated, fetishized, and stereotyped.
Between 1966 and 1970 she studied science and information technology at the Universidad Iberoamericana in Mexico City. In 1971 she studied photography at the City Literary Institute in London. Between 1981 and 1984 she earned a masters in visual arts at ENAP, UNAM (Escuela Nacional de Artes, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México) in Mexico City. Additionally, over the years Chellet has studied video art and performance and investigated popular urban culture with great depth. As a professor at the Faculty of Political Sciences at UNAM, where she taught between 1975 and 2009, she delivered workshops on popular iconography, exploring feminine archetypes of women in comics and fotonovelas. She also worked in journalism and created dioramas about Mexico and social issues for the Directory of National Culture in Mexico City. She began her career as a photographer, and her work gained prominence as a member of the Group MARACAS (Movimiento de Arte a las Cantinas [Art Movement to the Bars]) in the early 1980s, and for her participation in the second and third Coloquio Latinoamericano de Fotografía in 1981 and 1984.
www.hammer.ucla.edu/radical-women/artists/maria-eugenia-chellet
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ABOUT GRACE EXHIBITION SPACE
182 AVENUE C NEW YORK, NY 10009
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GRACE:
Grace, n. - simple elegance or refinement of movement
Grace Period - an extended period granted as a special favor
The Three Graces (Greek Mythology) - charm, grace, and beauty
Opened in 2006, Grace Exhibition Space is devoted exclusively to Performance Art. We offer an opportunity to experience visceral and challenging works by the current generation of international performance artists whether emerging, mid-career or established. Our events are presented on the floor, not on a stage, dissolving the boundary between artist and viewer. This is how performance art is meant to be experienced and our mission is the glorification of performance art.
Grace Exhibition Space presents over 30 curated live performance art exhibitions each year, showcasing new work by more than 400 performance artists from across the United States and the world since 2006.
Grace Exhibition Space for International Performance Art Space IRS tax-exempt 501(c)3 status in 2015.
Grace Exhibition Space follows the We Have a Voice Collectives Code of Conduct to Promote Safe(r) Workplaces in the Performing Arts For more information and resources, visit: www.wehavevoice.org