Body Language

Sunday,December 7th
Admission: Free, $10 minimum
Showtime: 7:30pm
reservations are recommended

Body Language is an evening of video in three parts by artists Kika Nicolela, Josh and Zachary Sandler, and Joy Whalen. Each is engaging the medium of video in order to explore the relationships between the body, space and our human need for comunication.

Kika Nicolela works primarily with video and photography.

She is concerned with examining the connections between the camera, subject, author and viewer. I'm interested in issues such as the construction of identity, communication and voyeurism. Nicolela also investigate how the relationship between our body and the surrounding world (ie. nature or urban settings and culture) shapes our identity.

Her greatest challenge is to find new forms of narrative by confronting established film language. I construct narratives, strategies and perceptions of reality, in search of fresh ways to connect with the viewer, defying his/her own perception of the world and proposing thought-provoking sensorial and emotional experiences.

This year she been also busy with the Exquisite Corpse Video Project, a collaboration project with several international artists that met here in artreview. More info at

www.artreview.com/profile/excorpse.

Joshua and Zachary Sandler are Brooklyn based artists who come from distinct creative backgrounds – Zachary is trained in modern drama and performance while Joshua studied photography and video. As teenagers the two brothers began collaborating on photography projects as a means to subvert a reality marked by alienating social constructs and a dysfunctional family. These early works, steeped in adolescent psychosexual energy, documented the fantasy, inhibition and intimacy shared between family and close friends.

They now work predominantly in performance-based video. The photographic sensibilities that permeate their video work, employing techniques fashioned for stretching out and locking in to highly emotional/visceral moments, were developed in large part during their adolescent collaborations.

As adults Joshua and Zachary are interested in examining the line that is drawn between adolescent and adult behavior and the dysfunction that often ensues as adults try to hold on to feelings of idealistic hope and youthful indiscretion. They employ post-dramatic performance style and highly confrontational documentary/interview techniques with sometimes-volatile subjects with an aim at crafting scenarios that attack and upset the sense of comfort that so often leads to the dishonesty and denial prevalent in modern life.

The Brothers aim to capture a general state of alienation, and the protective worlds people create in the mists of oppressive or tumultuous circumstances.

Joy Whalen, trained as a painter, currently works in perfomance-based video and drawing. Her work combines physically strenuous and meditative acts with the painful, humorous and tragic. These actions are intrinsically odd, based on acquiescence to childlike and/or immediate impulses, as well as playful absurdities that normally are repressed. As time progresses, the acts become ceremonies of release, weakness and sorrow, rituals of lamentation.
The character revealed throughout Whalen’s work is often reminiscent of a Hans Christian Anderson or Brothers Grimm heroine. Like such heroines, this character is on a journey, seeking something unknown, suffering in the present for the idealistic goodness yet to come. Ever since childhood, Whalen has been captivated by the art of story telling and folk lore and it greatly inspires much of her work

Whalen’s performance-based video work is awkward, industrious, dolorous yet hopeful. All aesthetic choices give way to a pursuit of perfection while leaving room for the discoveries found only in error. Compositions are tight and premeditated, although the action taking place is intuitive and unplanned. There is a conscientious use of space, color, form and action, and the works are enacted in vacant environments without the presence of an audience. These selective choices develop the invitation to another world: a world that remains a part of the present while the space fills with the capacity for wonderment that is sometimes purgatory and other times home.

www.artreview.com/profile/excorpse
http://www.dilemastudio.com
http://www.joshandzach.com
www.artreview.com/profile/joywhalen
www.joywhalen.blogspot.com