Inspired by the era of YouTube, the exhibition Artist as Performer features artists performing in front of the camera. Employing photography, video, and video installation, these artists use their bodies in constructions that are often quirky and perplexing. Several play-act in an effort to define themselves and how they relate to others and the environment. Others use the studio as a sculptural laboratory space to explore action and physical relationships between objects. Several artists make narratives, either re-creating scenes from memory, or fabricating fictional tales.

Inspired by the era of YouTube, the exhibition Artist as Performer features artists performing in front of the camera. Employing photography, video, and video installation, these artists use their bodies in constructions that are often quirky and perplexing. Several play-act in an effort to define themselves and how they relate to others and the environment. Others use the studio as a sculptural laboratory space to explore action and physical relationships between objects. Several artists make narratives, either re-creating scenes from memory, or fabricating fictional tales.

The exhibition includes work by Ok Hyun Ahn (Chicago, IL/Seoul, South Korea), Diane Ducruet (Hamburg, Germany), Kara Hearn (New York, NY/Houston, TX), William Lamson (Brooklyn, NY), Robert and Shana ParkeHarrison
(Great Barrington, MA), Christopher Pickett (Houston, TX), Tim Roda (Harlem, NY), and Jaimie Warren (Kansas City, MO).

About the artists:
Exploring the perception of clichés, Korean-born Ok Hyun Ahn lip-syncs American love songs with emotional and sometimes flirtatious intensity, leaving viewers to develop their own perspectives of the artist´s sincerity.

Diane Ducruet´s self-portrait photographs, Performances of the Ordinary, act as absurdist alternatives to everyday actions. Whether dressing, dancing, or eating, she turns the ordinary into the irrational and back to ordinary forever changed. Ducruet is Editor of Plainpicture (Germany-France-UK-Denmark), a photography agency specializing in advertising, book-publishing and editorial works.

Kara Hearn "make[s] work about the way tragedies reside in the head; the way heroisms play out in the mind´s eye, the inside place where stories get conjured, dreamed, remembered." Created from disparate pieces of reality and filtered through dreams, Hearn´s video One Thing After Another is a humorous series of vignettes about the fallibility of man. Hearn´s work has been shown in various film festivals across the United States and abroad and she is a recent Core Program Artist in Residence at The Glassell School of Art, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.

Brooklyn-based artist William Lamson is informed by the history of performance art, studio-based practice in the late 60´s and 70´s, and happenings. On view at HCP are Lamson´s video documents of actions performed in his studio and his attempts to enact stunts performed by William Tell, as well as photographs recording experiments with flight. Lamson is a graduate of Bard College, MFA, 2006.

Working collaboratively, Robert and Shana ParkeHarrison create complex scenes about the relationship human beings have with the natural world. Intensely constructed, the scenes become a backdrop/interactive stage for the human subjects (primarily Robert and Shana) to inhabit. Internationally exhibited and collected, their recently launched series Counterpoint is about human stewardship of the Earth and associative tensions.

A recent undergraduate at the University of Houston, Christopher Pickett created The Kiss in 2009. The video installation humorously explores narcissism and abstracted stimulation.

Tim Roda situates his immediate family, including himself, in photographs of constructed worlds. Enacting fantasies and memories from his childhood, Roda blurs the boundaries of fiction and reality. The images are full of props constructed by the artist and display his love of loaded mis-en-scene. He is a recent recipient of a Fulbright Award to Italy by the Institute of International Education (Visual Arts, Photography).

Jaimie Warren creates candid self-portraits that embrace vernacular photography. Inserting herself into social situations and changing her own persona to fit (or not fit) the scene, Warren´s images contain humor and perceived drama. Her recent monograph, Don´t You Feel Better, was recently published by the Aperture Foundation.
- Madeline Yale, HCP Executive Director & Curator

Artist as Performer Related Events:
Sat., Sept. 12, 1 p.m. at HCP: Artist Talks with Diane Ducruet, Christopher Pickett and Jaimie Warren
Thurs., Sept 17, 8 p.m. at HCP: Film Night with Aurora Picture Show: Early Japanese and American Video and Performance Art (free for Aurora & HCP members, $7 non-members)
Thursday, October 8, 7 p.m. at HCP: Mildred´s Umbrella Theater Company presents Night of the Giant.
Directed and written by John Harvey, original score by Eliot Cole


PLEASE NOTE: Some artwork on display for this exhibition may contain objectionable material. Visitor discretion is advised.