Text Performances

I made you in my image

I made you in my image is a billboard and call-in audio piece produced for Montalvo Arts Center’s 2020 exhibit lone some. The work draws from the textual style and archival images used in Wayfinding, which was commissioned by the Studio Museum in Harlem in 2019. The image is an “excerpt” of a family photograph found in the New York Public Library’s Media Collection, cropped to show only a gesture of holding. The text is a fourth suggested question after Wayfinding’s three central focus questions: How much of care is patience? How much of life is coping? How much of love is attention? All four of these questions, and in particular How much of sight is invention? ask viewers to consider the relationship between people and cities as familial: the ways we are and are not able to be close to, or truly seen by, those we love, and the moments in which family love can leave us feeling more isolated or alone than we might imagine, from the outside, would be the emotional result of family structure. The billboard was on view at 6315 Shattuck Avenue in Oakland, CA, through July 31st, 2020.

For Joyce and Richard and Rose and Jerry and David and Cecil and Bernice and Sylvan and Daniel and Melvin and Irving

For Joyce and Richard and Rose and Jerry and David and Cecil and Bernice and Sylvan and Daniel and Melvin and Irving is a sound score of the 2018 Pittsburgh Synagogue Shooting, using available transcripts released by CNN (front) set against the timeline of a standard Saturday morning Shabbat service (back). This work was produced for Ear | Wave | Event Issue 4.

#thinkingofyou

#thinkingofyou is a postcard project designed to inspire one-sided, remote, intimate pair interactions. Participants can request a postcard, and will receive a message describing whatever thoughts and questions were on Chloë’s mind when she saw the request.

The project takes advantage of existing mail infrastructure in the basement 28 Liberty Plaza, a corporate building in which the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Workspace program is housed. The project began on October 11th, 2015 (day three of Chloë’s time in the studio) and will continue for the duration of her studio residency.

Postcard requests will be accepted until June 15th, 2016. If you would like to receive a postcard, please email Chloë with your name, address, and dates when you can be reached at that address.

If the postcards are uploaded and tagged by their receivers, they will form a somewhat random and incomplete archive, searchable at #thinkingofyou. This archive will naturally accrue other contents as well. I look forward to seeing the connections.

Your absence is like a drug for me.

A collaboration between Chloë Bass and Bill Dietz, Your absence is a like a drug for me was created for the final Month of Performance Art-Berlin. The project appeared at and around Berlin’s Liebig 12, for Sounding the Alarm: Theories of the Anti-Sight I, curated by Panoply Performance Laboratory.

The project is a co-written text that appeared as a series of simple prompts on stickers. Each prompt was designed to inspire a feeling of closeness between audience-members, with the inspiration to “collect all” the messages by moving throughout the space and discovering intimacies.

The full text of Your absence is like a drug for me can be downloaded here.

This slideshow is here so we both know what to do

This slideshow is here so we both know what to do was a presentation/performance presented at Akademie Schloss Solitude in February 2013. The slideshow (and the speech given by the artist in response to the slideshow) served as a series of cues that triggered various actions by the audience, which were assigned on index cards. Actions included: if you hear the word “performance,” please stand up; take photographs; if you see more than three people standing, applaud; and other simple tasks. Four audience members were also cued at various points to read from provided texts: Adrian Piper’s essay in Claire Bishop’s Participation, Lucy Lippard’s The Lure of the Local, Peter Brook’s The Empty Space, and Augusto Boal’s Games for Actors and Non-Actors. This process of reading cued by images and/or actions was a first foray into live footnoting.

This slideshow is here was created to question the format of the artist’s talk, which generally encourages passive engagement by an audience sitting in the dark. My work is best experienced as it is lived, including in presentation format. Bringing the audience to the light (and “to the stage”) allowed all listeners to have the experience of being part of a piece as well as learning about one.

Photographs by Patrick Ritter, Akademie Schloss Solitude.

Archiving the Now

Archiving the Now is a durational performance designed to serve the following purposes:

1. To document all of the artist’s activities during the allotted performance time.

2. To document the entrances and exits of any audience members during the allotted performance time.

3. To assign tasks to willing audience members in the service of documenting simultaneous/parallel “nows” that are not the artist’s.

4. To create a lasting, wall-mounted exhibition over the duration of the performance.

Archiving the Now results in three simultaneous timelines presented on index cards, alongside any residual results from either tasks performed by audience members, or the artist’s own observations.

The piece was originally developed for Glasshouse’s event of the same name, which took place in July 2013 during the Brooklyn International Performance Art Festival.
Image Courtesy of Glasshouse.

A future you can touch

A future you can touch was a participatory installation created for the Anti-Auto Show at the Contemporary Art Institute of Detroit, curated by Spread Art. The work encouraged gallery-goers to interact with other pieces in the exhibit as if they were at a car show. Each index card contained either a question or a mildly insinuating suggestion; some cards allowed for direct user feedback and response in writing.

The work was structured to mimic a social situation (the auto show) within a misapplied context (a gallery show). It was a test about the limits and successes of imaginative suggestions to alter a given context for a single individual.

Installation images (audience response detail) are courtesy of Christina de Roos, Spread Art.