Hixson-Lied Visiting Artist: Tony Orrico

Mike Kamm Author

04/04/2025 Added

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Tony Orrico is assistant professor of dance and sculpture/intermedia at the University of Iowa. His record of exhibitions spans five continents. His work investigates endurance, mark making, somatics, choreography, and collaborative improvisation. The School of Art, Art History & Design’s Hixson-Lied Visiting Artist & Scholar Lecture Series brings notable artists, scholars and designers to Nebraska each semester to enhance the education of students. The series is presented in collaboration with Sheldon Museum of Art.

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[00:00:00.000]Thank you all for being here tonight. It's an honor to introduce Tony Rico as tonight's Hickson Lead Visiting Artist.
[00:00:11.500]Tony is known for his ingenuity within the intersections of performance and drawing.
[00:00:17.140]He has performed and exhibited his work across the United States and internationally in Australia, Belgium, China, Denmark, France, Germany, Mexico,
[00:00:27.600]Norway, the Netherlands, Poland, and Spain.
[00:00:30.620]His visual work is held in permanent collections of the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, D.C.,
[00:00:37.420]the Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporáneo in Mexico City.
[00:00:42.020]He is presented at the Centre de Cultura Contemporánea de Barcelona in Spain,
[00:00:49.040]Centre Pompidou in France,
[00:00:52.280]Cranbrook Museum,
[00:00:54.540]the Museum of Central Africa,
[00:00:57.580]the National Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, China,
[00:00:59.580]and the New Museum in New York.
[00:01:01.580]Tony is one of the selected group of artists to re-perform the work of Marina Abramovic
[00:01:09.820]during her retrospective at the MoMA in 2010.
[00:01:13.180]His most recent exhibitions include Fit to Imprint at La Cometa Galleria in Madrid,
[00:01:19.580]and this one here now at Signs and Symbols in New York City.
[00:01:24.320]Tony is currently Assistant Professor of Dance,
[00:01:27.220]Sculpture and Intermedia at the University of Iowa in Iowa City.
[00:01:31.080]Please join me in welcoming Tony Urico.
[00:01:33.220]Thank you so much for that warm reception.
[00:01:45.660]I appreciate this opportunity to share my work with you all tonight,
[00:01:50.060]and I wanted to thank the Sheldon Museum of Art
[00:01:53.480]and the Hickson LEAD Visitor Series for inviting me
[00:01:56.860]and the School of Art and Art History and Design
[00:01:59.420]and my colleague, esteemed colleague here, Santiago Cal,
[00:02:02.700]for inviting me and setting up these opportunities for me to meet with students.
[00:02:06.320]I see some of the students I met today, and I've had a really rich experience already.
[00:02:12.500]I'm going to start with a little bit of background and context about my work.
[00:02:16.800]As Santiago shared, I am on faculty in sculpture and intermedia at the University of Iowa,
[00:02:23.120]and I'm duly appointed in the Department of Dance where I teach
[00:02:26.500]contemporary movement practices, composition, and I mentor graduate
[00:02:31.560]projects. And I also teach in the School of Art and Art History and Design in the
[00:02:36.560]intermedia curriculum, which begins with the introduction to time-based arts of
[00:02:41.920]video, sound, and performance, and then the advanced coursework integrates media
[00:02:47.620]with performance and installation and adventure into social and
[00:02:52.120]interdisciplinary practices. There's an image here
[00:02:56.140]of Hans Breder who established the intermedia program at the University in
[00:03:00.840]1966, an image of him in a teaching moment, and he taught there until 2000.
[00:03:08.080]And the program is really a first of its kind.
[00:03:10.960]It was grounded in experimentation of the liminal space between the arts,
[00:03:16.260]humanities, and sciences, and in his words he conceived of intermedia not as an
[00:03:21.940]interdisciplinary fusing of different fields into one,
[00:03:25.780]but as a constant collision of concepts and disciplines.
[00:03:29.540]And so the program was very performance-oriented and
[00:03:34.380]then became known for a lot of its video making,
[00:03:37.260]which at first was really used for documentation.
[00:03:40.980]And my approach to intermedia is not a particular history or canon.
[00:03:47.080]It's really about the sort of essence or spirit of intermedia and the sensibility.
[00:03:52.860]And so we consider the spatial and
[00:03:55.420]temporal and social dimensions of our work locating our active body in real time.
[00:04:02.600]More background is that I was a painter in my youth.
[00:04:08.740]My grandfather was a painter, and I very much admired him.
[00:04:13.180]I started studying oil painting with a woman in my community.
[00:04:17.100]But I didn't go to art school, I went to school for education.
[00:04:22.680]And then I started dancing my sophomore year of college,
[00:04:25.060]in a moment of really truly just walking into the studio
[00:04:28.100]and being really amazed by what I saw.
[00:04:31.160]And then I pursued an MFA in choreography immediately after undergrad.
[00:04:35.940]I moved to New York in 2002, and was there through 2010.
[00:04:40.800]And I painted all the way through that time.
[00:04:42.680]I think 2010 pretty much marks the last time I was painting.
[00:04:48.120]Here's a list of some of the artists that I worked for
[00:04:50.560]who were a major influence on me.
[00:04:53.560]They were contemporaries,
[00:04:54.700]and at times, collaborators.
[00:04:57.840]So the most formidable part of my art education
[00:05:00.580]is really through these experiences.
[00:05:02.900]And this first image on the left here is a choreographer,
[00:05:06.420]a Chinese-born choreographer, Shen Wei,
[00:05:08.740]who I danced with for three years,
[00:05:11.820]where we learned the fundamentals of Chinese opera
[00:05:13.920]and what that means in the center of the body.
[00:05:17.900]Several of the works that we performed were on canvas
[00:05:20.960]and incorporated live painting.
[00:05:23.220]I think you'll see how that
[00:05:24.340]has influenced me.
[00:05:26.380]After that is Trisha Brown,
[00:05:29.040]pioneer of Judson Church Theater.
[00:05:32.240]I worked with Trisha for four years.
[00:05:35.080]She's an American-born choreographer,
[00:05:36.860]and she also has a substantial collection of drawings
[00:05:39.960]that are based in performance,
[00:05:41.660]another influence I think you'll see resonates.
[00:05:44.320]Her performance installations and equipment pieces
[00:05:49.200]premiered at institutions like the Whitney
[00:05:51.240]in the late '60s, early '70s.
[00:05:53.980]And for about five years after I'd finished with the company,
[00:05:57.360]I continued to set some of her early works
[00:05:59.460]in different institutions internationally.
[00:06:03.100]To the right there is John Jaspers,
[00:06:06.300]a New York City-based choreographer that I performed with
[00:06:09.120]and later designed a set design for his work, "Canon,"
[00:06:12.680]which premiered at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 2011.
[00:06:16.160]To the right of that, Jack Ferver,
[00:06:19.860]who's a New York City downtown performance artist,
[00:06:22.480]choreographer,
[00:06:23.620]who I performed with in a few works,
[00:06:26.060]and a lot of his work is centered on queer identities.
[00:06:29.240]To the right of there,
[00:06:31.900]Faye Driscoll, a New York City dance theater maker
[00:06:34.940]who often puts dance in museum spaces,
[00:06:38.020]kind of treating dance as installation.
[00:06:41.000]And then lastly, as Santiago mentioned,
[00:06:43.020]I worked with Marina Abramovic,
[00:06:45.100]Serbian-born conceptual and performance artist
[00:06:47.540]for about a year in preparation for her exhibition,
[00:06:51.900]her retrospective at the MoMA,
[00:06:53.260]in 2010, "The Artist is Present."
[00:06:56.740]And I performed in three works
[00:06:59.140]over the course of three months in rotation.
[00:07:01.600]So I'm gonna move a little bit
[00:07:03.720]between some old and new work.
[00:07:05.160]It'll be a little bit of a non-linear experience,
[00:07:07.400]but I wanna cover some of the concepts
[00:07:09.500]from a physical practice that informs my work.
[00:07:13.900]This is an image of Eve Klein leap into the void
[00:07:17.380]that I've always appreciated,
[00:07:20.400]because much of my early work is centered on this notion
[00:07:22.900]of falling.
[00:07:25.600]When I was in college and first learning how to dance,
[00:07:28.360]I developed some pretty severe issues
[00:07:30.100]with my cervical spine and my jaw,
[00:07:33.560]kind of an advanced degree of TMJ.
[00:07:37.200]I always make the reference to Edvard Munch's
[00:07:39.400]"The Scream Face" because it was that dramatic
[00:07:41.900]where my jaw would dislocate
[00:07:43.420]and kind of press against my chest.
[00:07:45.780]And this would stick for minutes, sometimes hours,
[00:07:49.660]and quite a few times for several days.
[00:07:52.540]So it became quite a chronic condition
[00:07:54.820]and was very surprising to me.
[00:07:57.580]And so in 2005, I committed to this idea of lying on my back
[00:08:02.140]and simulating the sensation of falling through the surface,
[00:08:06.260]through the ground.
[00:08:08.420]And started to collect these subtle distinctions,
[00:08:11.060]which started to inform my body and fully reversed those
[00:08:14.640]conditions over the course of about four or five years.
[00:08:18.440]And so that really became a really important process to me.
[00:08:22.180]And revolving thematics in the work ahead.
[00:08:25.720]My work waning from 2012 is the most explicit example
[00:08:36.700]of how falling informs my work.
[00:08:39.260]And really marks a transition between two of my early series,
[00:08:42.200]which are my pin wall drawings and carbon second series.
[00:08:46.940]And I'll get into more detail about those.
[00:08:51.820]This work is about approximately 40 minutes.
[00:08:55.520]And I stand at four different orientations to the wall.
[00:08:59.260]First facing the wall, and then profile,
[00:09:01.820]and then facing away from the wall,
[00:09:03.640]and then the other profile.
[00:09:06.380]And I'm holding two graphite sticks in my hands
[00:09:08.580]where I'm tracing the contour of my body with my available hand.
[00:09:12.940]And then root the other hand into the wall.
[00:09:15.980]And whenever I pass a fold in my body,
[00:09:18.200]I let go of all the air and muscularity.
[00:09:20.460]So for me, this idea of letting go
[00:09:21.460]of all the life in my figure and then
[00:09:24.700]free falling with the graphite and leaning into the wall.
[00:09:27.520]This is from the Hyde Park Art Center in 2013,
[00:09:48.120]an exhibition called Moving Dialogues, curated
[00:09:51.100]by Baraka Desoleil.
[00:09:53.100]There's a second treatment that I call really a studio process
[00:10:14.240]to make distinction between what is in live performance
[00:10:17.860]and what's brought back to the studio, where I'm coloring
[00:10:20.740]the skeleton of the action with two hands simultaneously.
[00:10:24.980]I'm alternating pressure between my hands,
[00:10:27.860]pressing and letting up.
[00:10:29.080]And sometimes that comes into unison,
[00:10:30.940]and sometimes it's kind of a mismatched experience.
[00:10:34.120]And for me, it's this process of transforming the action
[00:10:37.300]into sediment, which kind of looks in the end
[00:10:39.700]a little bit more like a landmass and less skeletal.
[00:10:44.060]This is an installation at Marceau Gallery in Mexico City
[00:10:47.900]in 2015 exhibition.
[00:10:50.380]Movement Toward Definition of my work.
[00:10:53.580]And another one, Petrified Axe at PPOW in New York in 2014.
[00:11:00.120]And an installation view.
[00:11:03.860]You can kind of see the ghost figure
[00:11:05.900]in the center of the mound.
[00:11:07.300]Here's a detail, and I'm going to linger here for a moment
[00:11:13.740]because it's a nice way to illustrate a second attention
[00:11:17.540]that starts to develop with my physical practice.
[00:11:20.020]Where this sense of falling as like an integrated whole,
[00:11:25.060]I start to develop an ability to kind of sustain
[00:11:27.960]that sensation in the body.
[00:11:29.760]And I start to use that as leverage to wake
[00:11:32.200]up a secondary attention where I'm able to start searching
[00:11:36.100]for sensation along the topography of my body
[00:11:38.480]in this kind of comparison model.
[00:11:40.240]And this patchiness kind of emulates that in this picture
[00:11:43.440]of moving from felt sensation into unfelt territory,
[00:11:48.240]these kinds of gaps between
[00:11:49.660]feeling and not feeling.
[00:11:52.300]I've always loved this scene from Tarantino's Kill Bill,
[00:11:56.100]the first Kill Bill, where Uma's character is experiencing
[00:11:59.380]full body paralysis and she's saying to herself,
[00:12:01.800]"Move your big toe."
[00:12:04.100]It's this effort to feel that I begin to be really fascinated
[00:12:07.740]with, and I call this kind of process activation.
[00:12:11.740]And it really started to feel like I was illuminating drawing
[00:12:14.720]at the surface of the body.
[00:12:16.060]It's like between the threshold between inner space
[00:12:19.060]and outer space.
[00:12:19.300]There's another one from the memory bank
[00:12:23.840]where Ewan McGregor's character
[00:12:26.080]in "Train Spotting" is falling through the floor,
[00:12:29.000]albeit he's under influence to make that happen.
[00:12:33.240]So these two ideas come together in one
[00:12:36.660]of my earliest Penwald drawings, which is Penwald
[00:12:39.720]for Unison Symmetry Standing, and I'll talk more
[00:12:42.620]about that series, but I just want to share more
[00:12:44.620]about this notion of activation
[00:12:46.520]and then make one more distinction before I do.
[00:12:48.940]So, in this piece, Unison Symmetry Standing,
[00:12:51.900]I'm working with a concept that I call co-planing,
[00:12:54.480]which kind of combines these ideas of falling and activation.
[00:12:58.720]And the idea of co-planing is that three points in space
[00:13:01.060]that are not in a line are co-planner,
[00:13:03.660]inscribing a single space, a single plane in space.
[00:13:07.700]And so, if you look in the picture here,
[00:13:08.920]those dotted vectors are kind of an example
[00:13:10.960]of these invisible relational planes around my body connected
[00:13:15.740]to various stimuli around me.
[00:13:18.100]So, I'm listening and sensing distances in the environment
[00:13:21.600]around me while I'm locating
[00:13:23.000]and mirroring sensation on my body.
[00:13:25.540]And this next image, you get this idea
[00:13:27.640]of how those sensations then drop through my full figure
[00:13:31.140]and through the impression of my feet,
[00:13:32.680]this idea of falling while standing.
[00:13:35.480]And I use this as leverage back up through my figure
[00:13:38.580]and into the wall through the two points
[00:13:41.020]of graphite against the wall.
[00:13:43.120]And I'm monitoring the vibration or the movement of the graphite
[00:13:46.920]as these two --
[00:13:48.100]rolling frictions and equalizing the pressure
[00:13:51.160]between the left and right side of my body.
[00:13:53.640]And using that kind of detailing or attention to match the
[00:13:59.680]pathways between the left and right arm and the points
[00:14:02.180]of redirection in the drawing.
[00:14:05.980]There's a video from the performance in this state.
[00:14:16.760]The act of drawing for me feels
[00:14:18.100]kind of like slippage against the wall, like a residual.
[00:14:22.100]Where I'm tending to my body and this system of leverage
[00:14:26.100]and recycling that energy to motor.
[00:14:30.100]So in 2011, I wrote that the ideas to make use of a dynamic
[00:14:43.100]environment, passing sound, light, movement, et cetera,
[00:14:48.100]as well as what was being sensed within me, so my breath,
[00:14:52.100]sensations, thoughts, to stabilize my body's relationship
[00:14:56.100]to plantar surfaces around me.
[00:14:59.100]So a cough, pain, a judgment, a drop of perspiration,
[00:15:05.100]a breeze from passerby could all be felt.
[00:15:08.100]The outer edge of my knee, an insect climbing on the wall.
[00:15:11.100]There's always an insect in four hours' time.
[00:15:14.100]I can sense them spatially.
[00:15:16.100]I'm feeling the distance of being.
[00:15:18.100]I see these points as these virtual geometries
[00:15:21.100]that can be kind of energetically weighted,
[00:15:23.100]and I'm generating peripheral forces,
[00:15:25.100]leverage to continually calibrate my body to space and to the wall.
[00:15:30.100]So I do this over the course of three consecutive days,
[00:15:33.100]starting at the same time each day in these four-hour installments.
[00:15:38.100].
[00:16:06.100]Here's an installation,
[00:16:07.100]and I'm going to show you how to do it.
[00:16:08.100]I'm at the Cranbrook Museum of Art in 2013.
[00:16:12.100]I start on the left side, and in that left circle on day one,
[00:16:15.100]my right hand is dominant, and choice-making is how I feel it,
[00:16:20.100]and my left hand is instantly mirroring the action.
[00:16:24.100]In the second day, I'm on the right-hand side of the installation,
[00:16:28.100]and my left hand is dominant and making choices,
[00:16:31.100]and my right hand is instantly mirroring the action.
[00:16:35.100]And then on day three, I'm in the middle circle.
[00:16:37.100]In this space that really feels like non-dominance,
[00:16:41.100]where neither hand are decision-making,
[00:16:43.100]and I'm just working with the system,
[00:16:46.100]and neither hand is following the other.
[00:16:49.100]So a true sort of sustain of the sense of no domination
[00:16:53.100]between mind and hand.
[00:16:56.100]I'm on that third day allowing my knees to bend
[00:16:59.100]and myself to rise up to my toes,
[00:17:01.100]so I'm kind of intentionally breaking the boundaries
[00:17:03.100]and moving out of bounds.
[00:17:05.100]Here's a detail.
[00:17:06.100]Sort of highlights that central spine
[00:17:09.100]that becomes kind of significant to some work ahead.
[00:17:13.100]So I continue to perform this piece with collaborators
[00:17:16.100]and different excerpts or iterations of it.
[00:17:21.100]This is a two-channel video work with a collaborator
[00:17:25.100]that I've been working with for about six years now,
[00:17:27.100]David Herland, who's a sound artist and performing artist.
[00:17:31.100]He was an intermediate grad, a student of mine for a while.
[00:17:35.100]We made this work during the pandemic in 2020.
[00:17:39.100]We call it Cross Wake.
[00:17:43.100]It's a four-hour performance installation.
[00:17:47.100]And I'm drawing, as you can see here, with two microphones
[00:17:50.100]and broadcasting that sound into the space for David to respond to.
[00:17:55.100]♪
[00:18:05.100]So we're creating this cycle of reciprocation
[00:18:10.100]where I'm kind of leveraging my action from the sound I'm hearing from him,
[00:18:15.100]and he's leveraging his actions from the sound he's hearing from me.
[00:18:20.100]And the paper is backed with carbon paper,
[00:18:23.100]so the drawing is transferred
[00:18:25.100]onto another piece of paper behind it through carbon paper.
[00:18:29.100]And then as it tears away,
[00:18:31.100]it kind of gets etched with the sharpness of the microphone.
[00:18:34.100]And so there's a nice sort of qualitative finish to it.
[00:18:39.100]And here's an installation of the work recently at the exhibition
[00:18:44.100]at Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing in 2024.
[00:18:48.100]It's a full four-hour, two-channel video of four hours.
[00:18:53.100]And sometimes one of the things
[00:18:55.100]that the channels kind of goes out
[00:18:57.100]because of just technical difficulties in the capture of it,
[00:19:00.100]but there's always one resounding image holding the piece together.
[00:19:06.100]I had two other videos in this exhibition,
[00:19:08.100]and I was amongst a lot of artists that I really admired
[00:19:12.100]who worked between movement and visual practice.
[00:19:15.100]Tricia Brown, who was a mentor,
[00:19:17.100]Javier Leroy, Jerome Bell, and William Forsyth, and several others.
[00:19:23.100]And another collaboration that I'm active in,
[00:19:25.100]actively involved in, is with Brooklyn-based duo Sky Creature,
[00:19:30.100]who are Majel Connery and Matt Walsh on guitar.
[00:19:34.100]We've been touring different museums over the last three years together.
[00:19:38.100]It's a four-hour immersive performance,
[00:19:40.100]and it's really just centered on the joy of being together
[00:19:43.100]in this kind of high-endurance state,
[00:19:45.100]and it's been a lot of fun to share this work with them in that way.
[00:19:49.100]This is at the Stanley Museum in Iowa City recently.
[00:19:54.100]So that was a bit of a deal.
[00:19:55.100]It's a deep dive into my work, "Unison Symmetry Standing,"
[00:19:58.100]but I do want to come back to this kind of third distinction,
[00:20:01.100]which is how falling and activation led me to this sense of suspension
[00:20:08.100]and how areas or palates of sensation on the body
[00:20:11.100]can be kind of virtually cast through space
[00:20:14.100]and how that can enact directional force on the body
[00:20:17.100]and kind of generate a push or a pull
[00:20:19.100]or this like curious movements on the body.
[00:20:22.100]So this is an image of my notes from the early 2000s,
[00:20:24.100]and I think we should try something to kind of give you
[00:20:29.100]a little bit of experiential data so you're like,
[00:20:31.100]"What is he talking about?"
[00:20:33.100]So if you will join me, I'm going to invite you
[00:20:36.100]to hold your arms out like this.
[00:20:40.100]Cool.
[00:20:41.100]I call this to, from, and with.
[00:20:44.100]And pay attention to just what happens in the kind of framework
[00:20:47.100]of your body as I direct your attention.
[00:20:49.100]You got your fingertips just kind of stacked over your elbows
[00:20:52.100]and kind of soften your joints.
[00:20:53.100]your joints wrists elbows and just try to feel sensation on your right hand
[00:20:59.040]maybe across the palm or across the whole surface of the right hand and try
[00:21:04.500]to send that sensation to the left hand and then left to right right to left
[00:21:16.640]left to right, right from left, away, left from right, right from left, left from
[00:21:31.660]right, both to each other, both from each other, both to, both from, and
[00:21:44.380]simultaneously both to and from. Try to sustain a sensation there. To and from, to
[00:21:49.480]and from, to and from, to and from. Cool. Then let that go. Did you feel something?
[00:21:58.860]So it's this space of differentiation that really intrigues me. This versus
[00:22:06.320]that, this kind of modality of data collection, and this ability to kind of
[00:22:12.260]keep that play active and sensing how
[00:22:14.220]pressure is shifting in my body. And the mental cueing of this kind of takes a
[00:22:19.280]backseat where the body becomes, or for me feels like this residual form, moving
[00:22:25.160]in kind of mysterious ways. This idea of withness is kind of
[00:22:31.020]two-directional, maybe left and right in any various plane, and it's inverse and
[00:22:36.820]simultaneous at the same time, trying to sustain that sensibility to and from. And
[00:22:41.860]then kind of moving
[00:22:44.060]into this idea of suspension, if you imagine this being kind of spherical or
[00:22:49.220]multi-directional, kind of moving through all oblique directions in space, it's
[00:22:54.260]both centrifugal, this idea of the center fleeing, and centripetal, this idea of the
[00:22:59.880]center seeking itself, so this affirmation of two different directions
[00:23:03.560]of energy in three dimensions. And so I know that sounds a little sci-fi, but
[00:23:09.800]I'm playing with this for a while, became distinction
[00:23:13.900]I could actually navigate. So you'll see in the notes, in the
[00:23:23.440]kind of upper, the back notes, this little drawing which I then turned into a
[00:23:28.360]sculptural form, a model, to try to capture this sense of slippage in space
[00:23:33.040]or this idea of like energetic mobility, where the wood panel in the middle can
[00:23:37.660]kind of move and sensation can kind of organize itself and elongate itself through
[00:23:43.740]space. And I go as far as kind of mapping all of these physical distinctions and
[00:23:50.820]use it as kind of a guide to locate exactly what I'm playing with and where
[00:23:55.840]the points of entry are and even how to maybe grab certain components and
[00:24:01.440]compose from those components. And one of those concepts is narrowing and parting
[00:24:07.900]and I bring this forward because it's really similar to the terms of like two
[00:24:13.580]and from that you just experience this inverse simultaneity, these expansive
[00:24:19.320]qualities that are felt and I kind of use this in this imagery in some recent
[00:24:26.140]work. I'm working with a colleague at the University Terry Conrad who's been a
[00:24:30.300]visitor here in printmaking on some intaglio prints and this new series of
[00:24:37.100]plates that I'm working on are depicting these amalgamations of hair and partings,
[00:24:43.420]braids, entanglements, loose ends, trying to kind of capture this
[00:24:49.120]tensional dialogue between energies of parting and gathering. So this is very
[00:24:56.560]recent work. I'm still discovering for myself what kind of meaning-making
[00:25:01.720]I'm engaging here and I know that I'm ruminating on ideas of the construction
[00:25:06.800]of gender. I'm thinking about hair as searching, as posturing, and also as kind
[00:25:13.260]of inevitable fallout. This one's kind of evoking a surrealist landscape for me,
[00:25:22.560]but I've kind of become these different anatomical figures. So my series
[00:25:31.080]"Penwall Drawings." This is an installation, my first true installation of this work
[00:25:36.840]on the very early side. I started experimenting with these drawings in
[00:25:40.400]2008. This is my first exhibition
[00:25:43.100]and live performances of them in 2010 in Eindhoven at a really cool festival. My
[00:25:51.500]Penwall Drawings are these bilateral, so two-handed graphite drawings that are
[00:25:55.480]derived at through performance and performance scores. And they're centered
[00:26:00.600]on biomechanics, physical measure, and sustained action. "Penwall One: One Circle"
[00:26:08.820]2009 was my first Penwall drawing. It takes about 20 minutes
[00:26:12.940]I count my strokes. It's a thousand strokes because I felt like that was the
[00:26:18.160]right gradation for the image. I'm working within the span of my arms. I'm
[00:26:22.900]lying prone, so belly down, and circumnavigating around my navel and
[00:26:28.420]walking on my toes. So displacing the gesture. "Penwall Seven: Four Three-Quarter
[00:26:37.060]Turns Left." A literal description of the action. It's a much shorter drawing. It takes 10
[00:26:42.780]minutes to complete and it ends when it simply completes its visual logic and a
[00:26:50.060]detail. "Penwall Two: Eight Circles, Eight Gestures" is approximately a three-hour
[00:26:58.440]performance. It ends when the task is accomplished. Eight circles and eight
[00:27:03.900]different laps. And I first presented it at the National Academy of Sciences in
[00:27:09.060]2010. Here's a comparison
[00:27:12.620]to at the National Academy of Sciences, Hildreth Meier, a mural artist who
[00:27:18.660]painted the dome of the National Academy of Sciences with eight medallions of the
[00:27:23.940]eight sciences. In this very early commission, I was really inspired by the
[00:27:28.940]the likeness of both in scale and the the eight. And so I interpreted it by
[00:27:35.720]kind of borrowing those graphics from the medallions and coming up with new a
[00:27:40.580]new series of gestures that
[00:27:42.460]became the graphic score for my first public performance. And so sometimes I
[00:27:45.880]fluctuate between the original eight circles and eight circles eight gestures.
[00:27:50.740]This is at the CCCB in Barcelona a year later. And some video from my
[00:28:01.700]presentation at MUAC, a contemporary art museum in Mexico City. It's my first
[00:28:07.300]opportunity to get an aerial perspective of the work.
[00:28:12.300]They presented a kind of a mini retrospective of all my Penwald drawings
[00:28:16.740]and acquired two of the works. So it was a celebration of the acquisition.
[00:28:23.040]When I first rehearsed this work it was at an artist residency in Hudson, New
[00:28:34.920]York and I rolled out my paper and everybody was eating lunch and
[00:28:42.140]I didn't know I knew that I was gonna make some circles and work with gesture
[00:28:45.740]but I didn't know that rolling to the side that you know with the width of the
[00:28:51.040]hips and the ankles slightly skews the trajectory and it was a surprise that it
[00:28:57.060]brought me back home to my eighth circle and it kind of unlocked a like okay this
[00:29:01.940]is something you know there's a little bit of micro adjustment but mostly it's
[00:29:06.720]pretty pretty literal just rolling once over and that simple displacement
[00:29:11.980]there you see a little adjustment and everybody brought their lunch upstairs
[00:29:17.860]and so it turned into a performance incidentally
[00:29:22.280]performance at Centre Pompidou in Metz in 2014 in conjunction with the
[00:29:32.500]exhibition simple forms and another group exhibition at University of
[00:29:37.720]Buffalo Art Gallery and on the ground I'm performing
[00:29:41.820]prone to stand which is a three-hour performance there are three level
[00:29:46.980]changes and a caller who says change and the first one I'm lying prone so facing
[00:29:52.620]the ground filling the span of my arms and then in the second layer I come to
[00:29:58.200]knees with the crown of my head balancing on the floor and I have this
[00:30:01.760]little bit of rock ability which changes the perimeter of the piece and then I
[00:30:06.960]come to a hunker and allow myself to stretch my legs and forward fold and
[00:30:11.660]hunker which is like a low squat and fill the span of that space and then it
[00:30:16.620]ends when I come to stand for me it's a reflection on like evolutionary
[00:30:23.060]development from belly to traversing land a 90-minute work wrists on walk is
[00:30:31.860]also in three stages of 30 minutes in the first stage I'm seated at a chair at
[00:30:37.020]a table and I'm filling the span within my wrists using my wrists as a point of
[00:30:41.500]pivot and then I walk my hands forward and out to the side and reregister the
[00:30:48.400]same activity which lifts me from my seat and becomes a somewhat
[00:30:52.540]uncomfortable posture to hold for 30 minutes and then the next walk the
[00:30:56.800]wrists walk forward and outward I'm at my fullest extension where my arms are
[00:31:00.860]fully spread and I'm you know directly over the table kind of parallel to the
[00:31:04.900]surface and so the intensity starts to build from kind of a casual presentation
[00:31:11.340]more and more based in endurance you can see some smudging there and you know
[00:31:17.320]body starts to become a smudging tool and a lot of these works becomes kind of
[00:31:23.660]a staining that you know is a part of that I got the identification of the
[00:31:28.460]piece you can see it here too in Penwald three circle on knees I'm using the
[00:31:34.300]pendular swing of my arm to strike the surface of the paper I'm on my knees and
[00:31:38.260]I'm walking on my toes in a circle
[00:31:41.180]and every strike has kind of a bounce and a pull so it gets that nice effect
[00:31:44.960]of kind of a stipulation a stipple and a stroke and I'm circulating on my knees
[00:31:52.300]ten revolutions or sorry eight revolutions two are the center circle
[00:31:57.740]and then I slowly walk my knees to the outer circle for two more revolutions
[00:32:01.940]and then walk my knees to the inside and then I complete it with two in the
[00:32:05.780]center again and this is a photo from the
[00:32:11.020]groundbreaking ceremony at the Stanley Museum in Iowa City this work is now in
[00:32:16.240]their collection and it completed the work for me so I do these performances
[00:32:22.140]in Penwald as an addition of eight on paper and that was that my last my last
[00:32:29.080]rendition of knee circle Penwald eight twelve by twelve on knees in total is a
[00:32:37.480]hundred and forty four knee circles each are just a single
[00:32:40.860]evolution it takes approximately four hours to complete the work and I have an
[00:32:46.360]engagement coming up in 2026 and I haven't performed this work in many
[00:32:51.680]years I see if I can land it right now but it's been many years and it's
[00:32:56.180]probably one of my most intimidating works to consider re-entering I don't
[00:32:59.920]practice these ideas I really wait for the live moment to kind of meet the
[00:33:03.980]challenge and find myself in the work again and it really is about maybe 30
[00:33:08.920]minutes in where I
[00:33:10.700]start to land it feels like a home base like I've been here before I know all
[00:33:15.400]these conditions this will be at the Picasso Museum in Malaga in 2026 here's
[00:33:22.200]at MUNAL the National Museum of Art in Mexico City and some notes me trying to
[00:33:29.420]figure out the patterning as I place the circles which is not that straightforward
[00:33:35.180]I'm accountable for a lot of number patterns and kind of skipping areas in
[00:33:40.540]order to get the resolve the rhythm
[00:33:45.080]so the discovery was that 12 knee circles fit into one larger encompassing
[00:33:52.920]circle which I dial by as you see here reaching my arms out and my arms kind of
[00:33:58.120]become a surveying tool I can look forward and kind of find where another
[00:34:02.420]circle lies across the space in order to pull back onto my knees and there's a
[00:34:06.880]little bit of like fingers crossed trust that I landed my seat
[00:34:10.380]in the arc of that the circle that I'm working out so I'm always using circles
[00:34:15.780]across the space to find my alignment
[00:34:19.740]when I unfold in between the postures I take a moment to breathe the full
[00:34:26.100]breath cycle every time and it just kind of keeps the pace for the work and also
[00:34:31.560]allows me to really alleviate compression in my knee joints
[00:34:40.220]so there's a lot of times where there's kind of a ritual of self-care built into
[00:34:50.520]the work this performance is three hours lateral bends lost simply tired titled
[00:34:56.380]because the symmetry is lost in the permission to bend laterally project
[00:35:04.380]recoil is a 90-minute work where I'm pushing off the wall or projecting off
[00:35:08.340]the wall so imagine me lying prone
[00:35:10.060]and I'm coiled up against the wall and push out and then mark my distance
[00:35:14.860]that's achieved and then recoil on my forearms and toes all the way back and
[00:35:19.020]proceed and the markings kind of recede as my body tires so you can see how that
[00:35:24.380]like a kind of mark of achievement pulls back in this piece I'm drumming over my
[00:35:33.560]head until my arms fully succumb to gravity so just working from that prompt
[00:35:38.740]*Dramatic music*
[00:36:04.180]*Dramatic music*
[00:36:34.160]*Dramatic music*
[00:36:42.480]Just kind of fast forward here to the ending to see the image.
[00:36:45.200]It takes approximately three and a half hours before my hands kind of flip and then gravity
[00:36:55.360]totally takes hold and my arms do come to my sides. Another rendition is Penwald 18-7 Drumstand,
[00:37:02.320]which is the same action but over the course of seven consecutive days where I start at the same
[00:37:07.440]time each day. And to my surprise, every time it lands just within minutes of like three and
[00:37:12.560]a half hours, but truly I just kind of devote myself to the prompt. And it's such a slow kind of
[00:37:21.120]dissolve down the wall that just naturally based on the architecture of the arms,
[00:37:26.160]the arms just kind of come together and flush through that central place,
[00:37:30.480]creating this shape quite naturally. So I'm entering my carbon series.
[00:37:37.520]This is Prepare the Plain 2012, which are dental occlusions on paper. So impressions of my teeth
[00:37:44.720]from biting. And carbon begins with a series of four works that are kind of a loose narrative
[00:37:52.960]through four different actions. It's the synthesis of the materials that I use. So
[00:37:58.640]paper, graphite, and body, and becomes this kind of ongoing metaphor that leads into this figurative
[00:38:05.120]transformation of my body into graphite. And I'm reflecting on this sense of readiness or
[00:38:09.280]preparation in the body, being similar to the sort of vibrational readiness or preparation of
[00:38:16.000]material, and that we're all carbon-based. And if you haven't caught, like with my story about
[00:38:22.800]the jaw, I'm also kind of antagonizing the antagonist of where a lot of this sort of
[00:38:28.160]introspection and work with the body originates. And when I do this work, I have to really maintain
[00:38:35.920]this substance-like presence in my body, where every time I bite, it's almost like I'm biting
[00:38:41.440]from my toes. So it feels like an entire bodied experience to really preserve my energy and create
[00:38:47.280]efficiency in my body.
[00:38:48.400]So the piece ends when the surface is fully chewed. It's an eight foot by eight foot run of
[00:38:57.680]archival like 250 gram paper. It's quite heavy. It's really quality paper.
[00:39:04.000]Or it ends when the paper brings me all the way to my back and my body is fully rested,
[00:39:13.440]similar to my drumming where when I really feel that last moment of release, it's over.
[00:39:18.720]And I've performed this piece three different times and each time it lasts about
[00:39:24.800]eight to eight and a half hours. There's some variation.
[00:39:27.200]And only once did I chew the entire surface.
[00:39:30.320]I'm so connected to the paper by the end, it really feels like an extension of me.
[00:39:56.720]And the weight of it becomes almost unbearable.
[00:40:00.240]That release really feels like a true parting when it's over.
[00:40:04.560]Here's a detail.
[00:40:07.760]And a little bit of blood from the friction from my mouth.
[00:40:17.040]The second piece, so if you imagine kind of removing the paper from the wall as if I'm like
[00:40:26.240]kind of readying the material, then the idea is to kind of open the wall. So this is "Open the Plane"
[00:40:30.800]and it's a three to four hour piece where I'm standing in front of the wall and my feet are
[00:40:36.000]stationary and I'm sourcing from my body to open the wall. So I start with my fingernails naturally
[00:40:42.000]and start to incorporate saliva and then
[00:40:45.200]start kind of pounding out pieces and using those pieces as leverage to take out more and more of
[00:40:50.400]the wall. And there are two layers to get through, through the studs into the other layer of sheetrock
[00:40:56.480]and on the other side is a box and I use that box to collect the materials and the clothing that I'm
[00:41:01.680]wearing. I light in the box to conclude that performance. Here's an installation. And then
[00:41:09.440]the third part is trace is the carcass where once was the body which is a title that I borrow from
[00:41:15.760]the writing of dramaturg Igor De Brysik who I was reading at the time. And I use my clothing and
[00:41:25.280]fill it with all of the material from the previous action and so it closed with just thread and
[00:41:31.840]needle and my teeth. And I leave back this kind of disfigured body and a fun fact about this work is
[00:41:41.120]Sonic Youth was preparing a sound check upstairs at the theater overhead and it became the soundtrack
[00:41:46.800]so when the video is in this like four channel display Sonic Youth sound check is the score. I
[00:41:54.800]like it. Here's the pieces in the box and then the fourth section vessel for governing and
[00:42:04.000]conception is the fourth piece. In my practice I have this classification between soft and hard
[00:42:10.940]palates of the body and later learned that there's a similarity to this kind of type of division in
[00:42:15.320]the body in Chinese medicine and Qigong and there are these two articulating aspects the governing
[00:42:21.260]and conceptual bodies and I have these
[00:42:24.320]early illustrations of me kind of dividing the body in these into these two ultimate halves the
[00:42:30.540]governing sense is sorry the yeah the governing sense is is about protection and it's the male
[00:42:35.880]aspect or the yang and it registers with high frequencies the conceptual aspect is the yin it's
[00:42:44.160]the essence of the body it's the fire I lost my slide and it's the female aspects or the low
[00:42:53.840]registry so these aspects for me kind of relate to the both like structure and expression that are
[00:43:01.580]both a part of this these series of works there's graphite powder in these ceramic pieces which are
[00:43:08.520]Baro Negro clay and the first action is to divide the body hemispherically and then all of the gates
[00:43:16.460]and bisections at the joints there's the coloration process the soft and hard palettes and then the
[00:43:23.360]of the box and it takes about two hours and 40 minutes to complete I move on into practicing
[00:43:30.440]suspension so activating my body and sustain that for a good while and then going to my get into my
[00:43:40.100]hands and knees and begin chanting and I'm working between low and high frequency in the body trying
[00:43:45.440]to warm these kind of male and female aspects of my body simultaneously and then I lie in the box
[00:43:52.880]I'm just noting I'm maybe like three different things I want to share before I conclude today
[00:44:02.900]but this next series is textiles there are studio drawings and I've been working on these since 2011
[00:44:09.200]and continue to develop this work they're based in memory that are memories that are mined through a
[00:44:16.820]physical practice that I engage where I'm lying beneath the paper and I collect seven memories and
[00:44:22.400]when I'm done I write them on the paper I reduce them down to short phrases and I write them as a
[00:44:27.740]list forward backward upside down backward and upside down forward continue to rewrite those
[00:44:38.660]phrases into radial symmetry and so it kind of propagates into a large tessellation of the text
[00:44:45.320]and my tools are quite limited I'm just drawing with a pencil and I have a small block of wood
[00:44:51.920]but it's not a you know a large ruler so I don't really have a lot of control I'm working pretty
[00:44:58.340]proximal the loose movement that develops from that is kind of akin to like a resting piece of
[00:45:07.400]fabric hence the name text and textile inside the task I begin to forget the content that I'm
[00:45:15.440]writing about it's you know I think each drawing is around 80 plus hours of writing I get distracted
[00:45:21.440]I make mistakes or I'm thinking and the incorrect words get kind of wrapped into the writing and
[00:45:27.380]when I notice them I cross hatch them out and kind of sew those pieces closed and so it creates these
[00:45:32.900]those like schisms create these gaps in the fabric and then there's this effort to try to rejoin or
[00:45:38.780]reconnect with the rhythm that often also fails and so I'm just interested in what that does as
[00:45:45.700]a result so this is these previous drawings I really like kind of for me representing this
[00:45:50.960]connect them of the mind like a sort of cross-section and there's a lot of fray
[00:45:55.100]and deterioration thinking about how memories fade and then also this repetition of how we
[00:46:01.460]repeat memories and they start to take on new meaning or even mutate but in more recent years
[00:46:08.120]I've been inviting more variability into this process and the drawings are becoming more
[00:46:13.940]architectural they become these constructions of thought so it's less about remembering
[00:46:20.480]and more about futuring this idea that while I'm writing I'm allowing myself to kind of
[00:46:26.000]spiral into these affiliate histories and confound real feeling here now with feeling
[00:46:31.760]then and just allowing the content to change and morph and retrofit new meaning into the
[00:46:37.800]imprint of what was there so it's this idea of kind of skewing the reproduction
[00:46:41.720]from a somewhat recent exhibition at signs and symbols show you some detail these drawings
[00:46:50.000]this is version of the event on the left and lipskin peel so those are examples of the phrases
[00:46:58.640]that come from the process I love you the way you are changing fit into the imprint scam artist
[00:47:08.660]omnipresent framer and an installation of all those drawings together this is at La Camilla in
[00:47:18.520]Madrid quite a few years ago and this is the first time I've ever done this this is the first time
[00:47:19.520]quite recently. I made two larger works that are, these are 44 by 30 inch.
[00:47:24.420]"Read the Room" and "Don't Force a Daughter."
[00:47:28.660]So this idea of tessellations
[00:47:34.760]continued to fascinate me and I made this work as a visual tessellation,
[00:47:40.600]but through performance and it's a tribute to Yvonne Rayner, tribute to one of her earliest video works,
[00:47:46.020]"Hand Movie" from 1966.
[00:47:48.940]It was filmed by William Davis in a hospital.
[00:47:52.040]She was in the hospital bed and held up her hand and just started to kind of improvise movement with her hand and he shot
[00:47:58.120]the film and they held up a bed sheet behind it as the backdrop.
[00:48:01.200]And it's a six-minute film. I'm just fascinated by this autonomy of a hand as a body, this disembodied
[00:48:08.940]figure deciphering its own direction through time and space and
[00:48:13.660]naturally it really makes me think about this isolation of parts of the body and the isolation
[00:48:18.920]of sensation in the body. And so with my partner Mindy, who's also a performer,
[00:48:24.260]we learned the six-minute improvisation as a rote choreography,
[00:48:28.160]which was quite challenging because of the subtlety of what it was,
[00:48:30.700]where we learned the right hand, her right hand, to ours and then cross-taught it to our left hand and then cross-taught
[00:48:37.320]each other to make sure that we were interpreting it to, you know, be exactly the same.
[00:48:43.580]And then we learned it backwards in retrograde, so we complicated our task and it's now
[00:48:48.760]a 12-minute piece and I worked with a composer who's responding to the
[00:48:52.940]the different parts of the five different fingers in the wrist in this
[00:48:59.480]layered way. So this is a process video just kind of showing you excerpts from
[00:49:05.580]Yvonne Rayner's piece, kind of doubled, to give you a sense of our learning of it.
[00:49:18.600]And the framing of it is double standard definition and that's why it's
[00:49:24.000]letterboxed in that way. We tried to get the ratio like of where the hand falls
[00:49:30.720]in the frame exactly right as well.
[00:49:48.440]♪ ♪
[00:50:16.440]- So to capture this,
[00:50:18.280]I had to build this apparatus where the camera is across,
[00:50:24.120]the action comes through the center of the table and the camera is across from the
[00:50:27.040]backdrop on a PVC cube that's on a track with caster wheels.
[00:50:34.480]And it moves, my friend, the videographer, is moving it.
[00:50:37.680]We have it measured out to be one centimeter per second.
[00:50:40.760]That's exactly 12 minutes divided by the circumference of the piece.
[00:50:45.320]So that it's nearly imperceivable, but it's getting
[00:50:48.120]all perspectives at once.
[00:50:49.880]So it's this circular pan.
[00:50:51.680]It's a compositional round.
[00:50:53.660]It's four dials of radial symmetry between our four hands.
[00:50:58.660]So for me, it's this kind of ultimate archive
[00:51:00.580]of her choreography, where you see all vantage points at once,
[00:51:03.960]which is even beyond the 2D display of the original.
[00:51:09.040]And this is the apparatus built.
[00:51:10.500]And in the center of the table, we have this grid
[00:51:16.120]so that we stay within frame, and then
[00:51:17.960]also we stay in focus, and so that the hands land pretty
[00:51:22.960]similarly to where in the original the hands land
[00:51:25.880]in the frame.
[00:51:28.760]We also can't see each other.
[00:51:29.920]Our heads are touching and our arms out in front of us,
[00:51:32.260]and you can't tip back and see the other pair of hands.
[00:51:35.840]So you just kind of hope that you're in unison.
[00:51:39.300]This was the kind of premiere of that work at Marceau and another
[00:51:47.800]installation at Let's Dance was the exhibition at Starry Bovar in Poznań, Poland in 2015.
[00:51:58.400]And before I wrap things up, I just want to kind of acknowledge a transition in my work
[00:52:04.480]and my way of thinking, 2020 was a paradigm shift for all of us.
[00:52:10.480]And since then, I've really turned more toward collaborative projects, but the way that my
[00:52:14.380]work is sort of kind of embedded in time, I've been able to
[00:52:17.640]continue to re-engage a lot of my older work.
[00:52:21.640]I've also been just looking for opportunities to learn more about others and myself.
[00:52:26.640]This video piece I made during the pandemic was made in my backyard with my son, who was
[00:52:31.760]five at the time, and it's called "My Weeds are Opportunity."
[00:52:35.140]It's a single-channel video of these different tableaus.
[00:52:39.140]And at the time I wrote, "Children are messengers when we listen to them.
[00:52:43.080]They are awake to what their bodies need and desire.
[00:52:46.180]I've been looking at spaces.
[00:52:47.480]In my experience that continue to meet denial, have resisted nourishment for some time or
[00:52:52.980]have gone missing.
[00:52:54.920]The politics within what I hold, what I manifest, the subtleties of how I harm are becoming
[00:52:59.920]more visible to me, that which is of my body, the social and historical bodies that I belong
[00:53:06.200]to, how our limbs extend, divide, other, and dominate."
[00:53:12.360]And so the task was really to engage this apology through performance.
[00:53:17.320]This is an image where I'm standing, I'm bent over, and my hands are in the grasp,
[00:53:21.500]but I'm trying to kind of trick the viewer to see maybe two bodies, like a younger and
[00:53:25.700]older pair of legs, standing and facing each other close together.
[00:53:30.800]There's a scene of my son picking apart purslane, which is an edible weed.
[00:53:36.220]It's really high in nutrition and in a lot of Midwestern backyards.
[00:53:40.620]So we're preparing a salad.
[00:53:43.700]The sound score is the sound of cicadas altered in various ways.
[00:53:47.160]And these are just excerpts of the video and a lot of inspiration for the work and some
[00:53:53.500]work that continues onward comes from two different things I'm reading or studying,
[00:53:58.940]Arawana Hayashi's Social Presencing Theater and reading a lot of Erin Manning, her books
[00:54:05.840]Relationscapes and the Politics of Touch.
[00:54:10.160]For me, that weed looks like an umbilical cord.
[00:54:17.000]I'm reading a lot of Erin Manning's books.
[00:54:46.840]There's another project that's in the Pursuit of Forgiveness with a colleague of mine,
[00:54:56.080]Dr. Christopher Rasheen McMillan.
[00:54:58.780]I had an invitation for this curated magazine exhibition for print, and we had a fallout
[00:55:05.120]and we decided that we were going to process it through performance.
[00:55:10.980]And so you get an assignment for this exhibition, and ours was about sports and pageantry, and
[00:55:16.680]we engaged seven different world sports and looked at the dynamics of the sport and found
[00:55:22.220]ways to transform the competitive model into these systems of reciprocity.
[00:55:27.980]And it was transformative.
[00:55:28.980]It was amazing.
[00:55:29.980]We had seven hours in a theater with a photographer, yeah, it was a really great project.
[00:55:39.300]And I'll end with one image of my work with Sarah Ann Colder, another, a friend, an artist
[00:55:46.520]in Iowa City.
[00:55:48.520]We worked for six months on this project, Four Hand Draw, that I originally researched
[00:55:53.660]back in 2017 at Del Chapo in Mexico City with a group of artists.
[00:56:00.880]And I always wanted to kind of figure out what this work was about.
[00:56:04.360]I knew it was about sharing power and deep listening.
[00:56:09.180]And the idea is it's kind of an opera for four hands, so between two bodies, where kind
[00:56:16.360]of exploring the social dynamics between us.
[00:56:20.180]And we do this both conversationally and then nonverbally.
[00:56:22.940]The nonverbal process is this drawing is the result of, where we're just kind of building
[00:56:27.680]upon each other's gestures and choices.
[00:56:31.880]And without speaking, eventually the drawing begins to know itself to the point where it's
[00:56:36.080]a choreography.
[00:56:37.080]And this is about 40 minutes of drawing.
[00:56:41.180]Every bit of it is completely known, even knowing our sort of motivations and intentions.
[00:56:46.200]Simultaneous to that, we're in this dialogue.
[00:56:50.680]And so sometimes we go to, you know, we think we're going to draw one day, but we actually
[00:56:54.160]talk for three hours.
[00:56:55.160]And we're just kind of interpreting, you know, the actions that are part of the drawing,
[00:57:00.340]what the intentions are behind them.
[00:57:02.820]Yeah, and sometimes those dialogues would last for days.
[00:57:07.820]And so it was really not about the drawing.
[00:57:12.360]And there's a collection of some of the drawings from the process.
[00:57:16.040]I'm going to skip over those last few collaborations and just say thank you so much for your time
[00:57:22.080]and your attention in sharing my work today.
[00:57:24.320]I'd love to open up the floor for any questions you might have
[00:57:34.860]or curiosity about some of the work.
[00:57:36.960]Yeah, please.
[00:57:38.520]Thank you so much.
[00:57:45.880]That was a really beautiful talk and beautiful work.
[00:57:50.720]I wonder-- I mean, I know that drawing
[00:57:54.120]was a huge part of his practice.
[00:57:55.520]And there was this particular work
[00:57:58.380]where if Alighiero Boetti is in any way an influence of yours
[00:58:02.840]with his work of like duality and male and female
[00:58:07.620]working together and collaboration
[00:58:09.860]and this famous piece where he learned
[00:58:12.300]how to draw with both hands simultaneously.
[00:58:14.580]Oh, wow, cool.
[00:58:15.480]No.
[00:58:15.720]I don't know the work, but I want to.
[00:58:19.280]Thanks.
[00:58:20.060]I might ask you.
[00:58:21.080]I'm going to write that down when we leave.
[00:58:22.660]Thanks.
[00:58:23.160]He's a drummer.
[00:58:30.020]All right.
[00:58:30.620]So it seemed like when you're doing a piece like drawing
[00:58:37.840]the circles or like the drumming,
[00:58:39.280]like for that long doing like repetitive motion,
[00:58:42.680]it could get like kind of meditative.
[00:58:44.520]And I'm curious.
[00:58:45.560]How much of the time is spent like kind of getting
[00:58:48.720]into like a trance and just going with the flow
[00:58:51.100]versus like trying to stick to that pattern of like
[00:58:53.840]with the drumming, it was like all kind of like in a line.
[00:58:56.340]So how much of like over those four hours are you
[00:58:59.200]like consciously sticking to a pattern in a direction
[00:59:02.340]versus just like giving into that repetitive
[00:59:05.040]like nature of it?
[00:59:06.640]Cool. Yeah.
[00:59:08.280]In terms of like relationship to meditation,
[00:59:10.180]which I have one, there's a distinction that I make
[00:59:13.780]between like, you know,
[00:59:15.400]meditation is really kind of single pointed
[00:59:17.740]and sometimes I'm using this sort of like these systems
[00:59:20.180]of leveraging a few attentions at once,
[00:59:22.800]which is a little antithetical maybe to pure meditation.
[00:59:27.480]It also feels like I'm kind of, you know, I'm, you know,
[00:59:31.480]in meditation you might, you know, focus on what's there
[00:59:35.080]in terms of sensation or a particular thought and you kind
[00:59:39.300]of let that be what it is and be in passage.
[00:59:42.600]But I'm like manifesting a whole lot of feels
[00:59:45.240]in my body which also feels a little opposite.
[00:59:48.880]Yeah, and though I do think it is a little bit,
[00:59:53.320]a lot of it meditative and even trance-like,
[00:59:56.480]but I can't break my concentration.
[01:00:01.220]Like whatever the sort of physical system,
[01:00:03.160]like the physical structure is and what the tasks are,
[01:00:06.700]I have to say super alert to what the components are
[01:00:09.940]in order to take care of my body and kind of survive the
[01:00:15.080]action.
[01:00:16.520]And so in that drumming, I mean, the structure of the arms
[01:00:19.280]changes so gradually, but if I could kind of fast forward the
[01:00:22.720]stills of that, there are moments where, you know,
[01:00:25.460]in that architecture, I'm trying to find what the most efficient
[01:00:29.200]structure is so like I can feel my elbows hung from my
[01:00:31.960]shoulders, but I can also feel my shoulders pass through my
[01:00:34.440]hips, down through my feet, and I can motor the drumming from
[01:00:38.340]that, and I can't let go of that concentration if I zone out or
[01:00:42.000]fall into the pleasure of it or the pain of it.
[01:00:44.920]Then I'm out, I'm south, and it's a lot to get back in.
[01:00:49.080]There's times where I think sometimes it feels almost like a
[01:00:52.380]strike up my spine, like I've been shocked, where my attention
[01:00:57.260]starts to fade and something physical happens.
[01:01:00.000]It could be so subtle.
[01:01:01.000]Like I've looked at video, I'm like, I don't see it, but I
[01:01:03.160]feel it.
[01:01:03.640]It's just some sort of imbalance, and it feels like
[01:01:09.020]bright white light to my spine, just like, ah, and then I get
[01:01:12.900]back on track.
[01:01:14.760]I'm trying to be very efficient in my joints,
[01:01:18.260]and I'm trying to be very true to the system that I established.
[01:01:21.300]Yeah, I can't fall asleep in it, really.
[01:01:25.040]Does that answer the question?
[01:01:26.580]I had a question about--
[01:01:32.300]so you have the remains of your process and efforts of time
[01:01:41.380]and your experience, but I'm wondering
[01:01:44.600]after the performance is complete,
[01:01:48.540]what happens with your coated in graphite?
[01:01:53.480]What is that next stage in coming back to a centering?
[01:02:02.040]Cool.
[01:02:03.140]Thanks.
[01:02:03.640]It's funny, each work is a little different in terms
[01:02:12.640]of what--
[01:02:14.440]what the action is and what the process of recovery looks like.
[01:02:19.380]And some things, like with this projecting off of the wall,
[01:02:22.900]it's rather short.
[01:02:24.020]It's like an hour and a half.
[01:02:25.240]But on my rib cage, my ribs swell up for days.
[01:02:29.600]And that piece, sometimes I'm like, what is that?
[01:02:33.880]What is that one?
[01:02:35.300]And then other ones are much longer and less of even any
[01:02:43.120]sense of maybe a recovery.
[01:02:44.280]Or a recovery phase or state.
[01:02:45.540]And sometimes it really feels like a flip of a switch
[01:02:49.500]at times, where I kind of peel myself off the wall
[01:02:54.520]or feel the first shift in my feet.
[01:02:57.520]And that feels monumental.
[01:03:01.380]And by the time I've turned around and faced the audience,
[01:03:04.800]I feel like I'm kind of just, I don't know, back to myself.
[01:03:11.720]Not that I escape myself.
[01:03:14.120]But I don't know, like it's the very sort of humble or kind
[01:03:20.340]of human quality of like, yep, yeah, that's what I want to say.
[01:03:26.680]It really does.
[01:03:27.320]It feels like a yep.
[01:03:28.300]It feels like, whoa.
[01:03:30.020]And I just, you know, I really am fascinated with,
[01:03:32.140]I don't think that like, I think we all have a huge capacity
[01:03:40.540]to endure a lot of things.
[01:03:42.580]And I just so happen
[01:03:43.960]to use these things for myself to meet certain aspects
[01:03:46.040]of myself and I'm fascinated with the systems.
[01:03:49.300]But I don't feel like other feel different than anyone else,
[01:03:53.740]you know, and I actually, I would love, people send me videos
[01:03:57.800]of kind of, you know, entering some of my work,
[01:03:59.580]but I don't know anyone who's ever entered the full score.
[01:04:03.720]And I would love to like talk with other people
[01:04:06.200]about what they find in that space.
[01:04:08.000]And yeah, if they find similar logic,
[01:04:10.040]if they find similar experiential data, you know,
[01:04:13.800]I think it's really game for that.
[01:04:16.040]- Thank you for the talk, it was really super fascinating.
[01:04:30.640]I have a question about those drawings
[01:04:32.720]that you make on the floor that are somewhat premeditated.
[01:04:36.180]You showed us there's some designs where you, you know,
[01:04:39.300]plan of how many circles you're gonna make.
[01:04:43.640]Have you ever considered using color for them?
[01:04:46.880]And I think I know why you wouldn't,
[01:04:48.780]but I kind of wanna hear about the decision-making there.
[01:04:52.400]- Yeah.
[01:04:53.860]Yeah, the very first circle drawing I did in 2008
[01:04:56.920]was with crayons.
[01:04:58.720]They were just what was available.
[01:05:00.320]And I was figuring out the gesture on the paper.
[01:05:04.560]And then when I started to turn it,
[01:05:06.100]it was like, you know, where the sort of first light bulb was.
[01:05:11.100]And that piece is in color.
[01:05:13.480]And I don't have it.
[01:05:14.580]I knew immediately that I just wanted
[01:05:19.000]to sort of track the action in a really more of a discreet
[01:05:23.420]and kind of opaque way of like, this is what it is.
[01:05:26.320]And it's-- you know, I love the grayscale.
[01:05:29.020]You know, I feel like I fell in love with just graphite
[01:05:32.540]as a material very different than charcoal.
[01:05:36.460]You know, there's different sort of gradations
[01:05:38.760]of softness and hardness between graphite.
[01:05:40.860]And I do-- each piece has its own assignment based
[01:05:43.320]on maybe how much dust and smear or smudge that I'm invested in.
[01:05:49.240]But it's slippery.
[01:05:51.420]And you know, it's one of the first things
[01:05:54.380]I realized when I did my first circle in graphite
[01:05:57.680]was they heat up because they're a conductor.
[01:06:02.180]They heat up like almost red hot.
[01:06:04.280]And so sometimes I'm like, oh, I got to slow that down
[01:06:07.060]because, yeah, it was just an interesting discovery.
[01:06:11.720]But I just-- I fell in love with graphite.
[01:06:13.160]And I kind of devoted myself to working with it.
[01:06:15.900]I like the sheen and the silver of it.
[01:06:19.700]And then also, when it's really loaded, the dark gray.
[01:06:24.620]I think slightly representational
[01:06:27.680]of that kind of in-between space that I
[01:06:29.300]continue to investigate, yeah, personally, visually.
[01:06:35.280]I'm like, in between.
[01:06:36.320]Thanks.
[01:06:43.000]Bless you.
[01:06:51.400]Hello.
[01:06:52.240]Are there any of your pieces that you particularly, maybe
[01:06:55.840]sometimes dread to perform?
[01:06:58.780]Or also, has there been pieces that you're like,
[01:07:01.900]I want to do that, but it'd be way too much on my body,
[01:07:08.500]or I don't know, in terms of that?
[01:07:12.180]I'll never perform.
[01:07:12.840]I performed waning again.
[01:07:14.460]I think I nearly shattered my hip in waning.
[01:07:18.060]I performed it maybe three times.
[01:07:19.980]Yeah, it took me a year to recover
[01:07:22.340]from one of those performances.
[01:07:24.020]And I'm not interested in that abuse to the body.
[01:07:28.240]I'm interested in the heightened states, for sure.
[01:07:31.920]But yeah, a lot of my work has this sort
[01:07:33.820]of built-in consciousness about nurture and care.
[01:07:39.040]But that piece, yeah, felt done, like the expression was made.
[01:07:42.680]And I really care about that piece.
[01:07:45.200]Maybe I do it on a gym mat, but that just sort of ruins the deal.
[01:07:47.920]I'm really-- yeah, I'd say I have some pretty big fear
[01:07:54.200]about drumming, walking toward the wall,
[01:07:57.260]and starting that for 3 and 1/2 hours.
[01:08:00.940]And it takes about maybe 35 minutes, I can feel it,
[01:08:03.680]when the fear fades.
[01:08:06.600]And then I'm like, it feels like I could go on forever
[01:08:09.840]if it weren't for gravity.
[01:08:12.520]And then 12 by 12 on knees.
[01:08:16.600]Yeah, and I'm aging.
[01:08:18.220]I'm 46.
[01:08:19.240]I started this work in my late 20s.
[01:08:24.760]But there is something about the organizational elements of it,
[01:08:28.780]of organizing the body and ability.
[01:08:32.920]There's so much energy is spent in anticipation.
[01:08:36.740]And I feel I'm more relaxed in my life,
[01:08:38.580]so I'm more relaxed in my work.
[01:08:40.000]And I don't know if it's will.
[01:08:42.360]Or concentration.
[01:08:43.740]But something has developed in sort of crossfade to also
[01:08:48.660]the fact that I don't really train in ways I used to train.
[01:08:51.840]And yeah, but funny note is my eight circles,
[01:08:58.200]though not recent, but the last time I performed it
[01:09:00.520]went really too fast.
[01:09:01.840]And I was like, I've got to slow down.
[01:09:03.400]I've got to act more tired.
[01:09:05.680]Yeah, I don't know.
[01:09:06.900]I think that there's an efficiency that develops.
[01:09:09.040]There's just so much resistance in the not knowing.
[01:09:12.200]That now I know.
[01:09:13.620]And yeah, yeah.
[01:09:16.260]But don't make me drum.
[01:09:18.360]Chewing the paper.
[01:09:23.560]That's another really intense one.
[01:09:25.320]Yeah, yeah, that one.
[01:09:26.440].
[01:09:28.260]Yeah, I know that feeling of walking up to that piece.
[01:09:32.040]And I love it.
[01:09:32.820]And I'm so resistant to it.
[01:09:35.060]But I think that that's part of the live contract of like,
[01:09:38.660]oh, it's on the books.
[01:09:39.580]And there are people.
[01:09:40.280]And they're interested.
[01:09:41.320]And I'm interested.
[01:09:42.040]And we're going to do this.
[01:09:43.500]And yeah, it feels like a contract.
[01:09:46.640]I was going to ask about if you've ever
[01:09:52.000]considered doing it on a gym mat or a more comfortable surface.
[01:09:55.420]Or is part of the process and experience
[01:09:58.480]for you the physical toll your body takes,
[01:10:01.000]being mindful of where you're putting your body?
[01:10:03.880]And would doing it on a softer surface
[01:10:07.540]kind of take away from that a little bit for you?
[01:10:10.000]Yeah.
[01:10:11.260]Yeah.
[01:10:11.880]I'm a bit of a purist.
[01:10:12.800]And again, not to be harsh to my body,
[01:10:15.020]but I think that the reduction of all of the elements
[01:10:18.260]and really thinking about the body as a material,
[01:10:20.920]that I wouldn't create an action that is maybe beyond the body.
[01:10:25.500]Definitely an action that would meet degrees of either
[01:10:30.740]impossibility or exhaustion.
[01:10:32.840]But yeah, I think the minimalist approach
[01:10:38.860]is most meaningful to me.
[01:10:41.720]Yeah, trying to figure out what these three elements in a room
[01:10:45.400]can do between graphite, body, paper.
[01:10:48.220]A lot of friends will be like, just put on knee pads.
[01:10:53.820]You know, I'm like, no!
[01:10:56.740]I won't.
[01:10:57.240]Thank you.
[01:11:08.940]Thank you so much.
[01:11:11.560]Thank you.
[01:11:13.560]Thank you.
[01:11:13.960]Thank you.

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Hixson-Lied Visiting Artist: Tony Orrico

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