Saturday, April 28, 2018
4 - 6 PM
Please RSVP to projectspace@efanyc.org.
Feet on the Ground is a participatory group performance and art collaboration that asks, 'how do we decolonize ourselves?' Featuring a custom-made toolbox containing items designed by artists Esther Neff, IV Castellanos, and Maria Hupfield, the artists invite the audience to participate in empowering the collaborative and considerate by making new items for the toolbox using materials provided onsite. Conducted as an ongoing series of performances, each one informing the next, this project brings together survival strategies of politically-minded performance artists.
The artists will introduce new items, and collaborate in the space with visitors and invited guests during regular gallery hours, leading up to this two-hour performance. For EFA's iteration of #callresponse, the artists have created a custom bookshelf and triangular bench-style pedestal. Unlike the military term “boots on the ground” the title Feet on The Ground is one where direct community interaction and liberation of the undressed foot takes priority over combat. Previous iterations of this project were performed in New York at MAWA Gallery, Bullet Space, and Emily Carr University of Arts and Design (Vancouver, Canada).
PARTICIPANTS
Maria Hupfield is martin clan, Anishinaabe and a member of Wasauksing First Nation, Ontario, based in Brooklyn NY. Her solo traveling exhibition The One Who Keeps on Giving premiered at The Power Plant in 2017 and was featured in Art in America. She is the first Indigenous Artist Resident at ISCP 2018, has performed and exhibited at Site Santa Fe Biennale 2016 and is a recipient of the Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptures Award. She is a member of Social Health Performance Club and co-owns Native Art Department International with artist Jason Lujan.
IV Castellanos is a trans Bolivian-American sculptor and abstract performance artist based in Brooklyn, NY. They were a 2017 AIR Chez Bushwick resident with collaborator Amanda Hunt and Gibney Work Up 2017. IV is Founder of the IV Soldiers Gallery 2014, Founder of the Feminist Art Group 2015 in collaboration with Esther Neff and is a regular performing member of the Social Health Performance Club.
Esther Neff is an artist, organizer, and independent theorist whose work deals with forms-of-life, mentalities, social gathering, and ways-of-seeing (theories and beliefs). She is the founder of Panoply Performance Laboratory (PPL), a lab site in Brooklyn, a performance-making collective, and thinktank. Neff’s performance work (solo and as/with PPL) has been performed at Momenta Art, The Kitchen, The New Museum, Dixon Place, Bronx Museum, 14 Wall Street (NYC) as part of festivals in Chicago, Berlin, Copenhagen, and elsewhere across the USA and around the world. She is also the instigator of Brooklyn International Performance Art Foundation (BIPAF), PERFORMANCY FORUM, and is currently co-opening a life-art lab in St, Louis called MARSH (Materializing and Activating Radical Social Habitus) with her mother.
This event takes place in conjunction with #callresponse (March 23 - May 5, 2018).
