Power Play

POWER PLAY

Pussy Noir (w/Jennifer Jacqueline Stratton)

Duration: 1 hour, 3 movements

Location: Duke University, East Building.  Blue Parlor

Description:
Power Play explores social change with image. Centered in fashion, décor and
the role they have on changing society the installation is to project images of
power through a series of fashion iconographies. By displaying one person as
such, others are invited to watch and be intrigued by how subtle and explosive
power and change can be harnessed into one single entity.

Living Installation + Performance:

On Friday, November 9. 2012 Power Play was performed at the Duke University XCO Group Exhibition as part of the 2012 Hemispheric Convergence Conference: The Geo/Body Politics of Emancipation.  This performance was produced specifically for the Blue Parlor space and conference.  The historic Women Studies Parlors in the Duke East Building are centered in French Victorian design and contain 12 portraits of Women’s Firsts at Duke.  As part of this performance Pussy Noir’s own image and artifacts became part of the room’s decor. Exhibition attendees who wandered into the room were suddenly met with an ongoing performance as Pussy Noir constructed and deconstructed a series of power roles and fashion iconographies.  Meanwhile in the opposite corner of the parlor, polaroid film captured each transformation was developed every three minutes.  These images were used to construct a dress, re-mediatig and re-presenting the performance in real-time.  There became multiple levels of observation, watching the performance, watching a creation based on the performance and watching others watch the performance.  Eye contact was established and played with as viewers engaged or didn’t engage with the performer.  Changes in movements occurred every three minutes (the time it takes to develop one polaroid).  The indicator of this change was an hour glass set for three minutes, but offering new information of overall time as it was turned throughout the performance.  After one hour, the polaroid garment was completed and re-located to where Pussy Noir originally sat for the remainder of the conference.

Selected Video from the Performance:

Power Play from Jennifer Stratton on Vimeo.

http://vimeo.com/55439692

What is my song?

I want to be a song. I am going hitchhiking using rock n’ roll lyrics as signs to identify myself.

Below is documentation of a ride.

Tom Petty- Free Fallin’ -White Cross, NC to Carrboro, NC

ENERGY ELEVATOR

The Energy Elevator Coffee shop operated for two weeks during the fall of 2012 at UNC-Chapel Hill as an effort to use the phenomenological conditions of the elevator (a space that moves up and down at the call of a commuter) to consider the relationship between Energy and Potential Energy.

Taken from Wikipedia: Energy is the capacity to produce change. Potential energy is energy that is stored in matter.

Following the coffee shop, I held three subsequent events in area elevators. Two of these events were meditation workshops, one was attended and one was not. The final event was an art show, which stayed up for two months and was well received. Below is an institutional warning issued in regard to one of the meditation workshops.

Hymn to the Night

Hymn to the Night audio clip

I recorded a night and then played it back to the following night. I recorded that night and layered it over the first night, playing this back to the third night. I continued to record, layer and play back these previous nights to the current night. This recording sequences 25 nights together.

2012
Durham, NC

Jail Central

4^th Street –  Mecklenburg County Jail Central

by Annabel Manning

4^th Street is a video showing undocumented adult Latina inmates participating in a Spanish-speaking art and poetry project at the Mecklenburg County Jail Central in Charlotte, North Carolina. This program is an ongoing collaboration between the inmates, the Jail Central Special Programs Department, the Bechtler Museum of Modern Art, and myself. Going forward, we will build on our recent use of iPads to show inmates artworks on display at the Bechtler Museum and next to allow the inmates to use the iPad to curate their own art show at the Bechtler from the jail.

Michael Tauschinger-Dempsey / Corporate Culture Wars

Be Business

Single channel projected video, 4’40″

Statement:
Corporate culture forms a universe parallel to that of normal human interaction. Similarly, corporate culture is also defined by ritualistic behaviors and relational norms, but when taken outside of the framework of best business practices, it can seem awkward, at best and pathetic, at worst. As children, we all learn how to behave in public, in school and at a friend’s house. When we grown up, most of us need to be re-programmed according to the behavioral norms of the business life: how to present oneself in public; how to eat at a fundraiser dinner; how to shake hands; how to effectively move your body and appropriately use language at your next job interview; how to express oneself in a board meeting, etc. In short, we have to assimilate the rules of the ruling (business) class, if we have any hope of reaching for this strata at all. In essence, corporations have created their own experimental meta-community — one that excludes and marginalizes the rest of society.

Empty Boardrooms

Framed image 44″ x 54″

Statement:
Performing a Google Image Search query with the word “boardroom” results in approximately 15,000,000 images of empty boardrooms. Several questions arise: why are spaces designed for human interaction/communication depicted as empty? Why do people take pictures of these empty spaces? What do these spaces and the many images of them tell us about our culture and our concept of business, work, importance, and status? Capital and power beg to be represented in tangible ways, and the imagined ownership of exclusive and available spaces satisfies this modus vivendi desire, if you will. The potential for human interaction and communication is not only embodied in such charged empty spaces, but also simultaneously excluded from such spaces. Boardrooms, empty or not, deny the general public from any kind of democratic participatory agency, which fits nicely into seemingly innocuous but dramatically exclusionary private property clauses. Boardrooms are the sacred spaces of the corporate parallel universe; non-members of the corporate elite are simply not welcome.

http://www.michaeltauschingerdempsey.com/
http://co-operation-corp.tumblr.com/

Jennifer Stratton

HOOPLAH

Jennifer Jacqueline Stratton

Embroidery Hoops (various sizes)

Description: Non-traditional embroidered art inspired by biological imagery.

__________

POWER PLAY

Pussy Noir (w/Jennifer Jacqueline Stratton)
Medium: Performance (living installation)
Location: Blue Parlor

Description: Power Play explores social change with image.  Centered in fashion, décor and social engagement the installation is to project images of power through a series of fashion iconographies.  By displaying one person as such, others are invited to watch and be intrigued by how subtle and explosive power and change can be harnessed into one single entity.

Joe Silver

Ghosts of Katrina 

Joe Silver, video monitor, 3:31.

Ghosts of Katrina is a short film drawing on pre-existing footage from two significant natural disasters that have hit the Gulf Coast region, Hurricane Betsy in 1965 and The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927. My aim is to suggest resonances between these two events and those of more recent calamities that have hit the region.

The film is set to a live, solo drum-set performance by Ari Hoenig, recorded at Loyola University in New Orleans on January 18, 2008. Hoenig has adapted for drum set the children’s Gospel song “This Little Light of Mine” by Harry Dixon Loes. Many believe this song was originally inspired by a passage from the Gospel of Matthew, where Jesus proclaimed: “Ye are the light of the world. A city that is set on a hill cannot be hid. Neither do men light a candle and put it under a bushel, but on a candlestick; and it giveth light unto all that are in the house.” 5:14-5:15.

Talena Sanders / The Wilford Woodruff, Sr. Cabinet of Curiosities

The Wilford Woodruff, Sr. Cabinet of Curiosities

Talena Sanders, installation, 2012

Named for the fourth President and Prophet of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, the Wilford Woodruff, Sr. Cabinet of Curiosities displays a collection of Mormon curiosae, gathered from across the Mormon trail – the path the 19^th century Mormon pioneers traveled in their westward expansion pilgrimage. Wilford Woodruff, Sr. was President of the LDS church during the prohibition of the practice of polygamy, and was a noted diarist.  His daily journals, meticulously kept from the age of 8 until his death at 91, are stored under restricted access at the LDS Church History Archives in Salt Lake City, UT.

A Desperate Attempt to Solve the Mormon Question.

Color Lithograph from Puck magazine, 1884.

Four artists’ takes on the “Mormon Monster”, printed in 19^th century New York City.  Part of the Wilford Woodruff, Sr. Cabinet of Curiosities collection.

Laurenn McCubbin

Vagina Detritus (Parlor installation and photo)

This objects are the result of a collaboration with a group of sex workers based in New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco. I have been documenting their lives and their work for four years, and this collection of objects have been curated by them. Each object has a purpose and a reason, imbued with meaning through it’s labor.

My collaborators: (links are NSFW)

Jolene Parton

Arabelle Rapahel

Dylan Ryan

Audacia Ray

Courtney Trouble

Maxine Holloway