Labor Day Lectures 2013
The Center for Experimental Lectures presents Sophia Cleary, Chris Domenick, and Alhena Katsoff
Saturday, August 31, 2013
The Shandaken Project
300 Route 42, Shandaken, NY
The Center for Experimental Lectures returns to Shandaken for a second Labor Day weekend campout. This year's edition will include lecture-performances by 2013 resident Sophia Cleary, as well as Chris Domenick and Alhena Katsof. Guests are welcome any time in the afternoon on the 31st, and to stay on after the lectures for eating, drinking, and camping.
Alhena Katsof's presentation, provisionally titled The Garden Is Overgrown , will explore gardens and woodlands as an enchanted, darkly mnemonic device. Burials of various kinds and the occasional zebra crossing take place as we meander through stories of fantastical cultivation. Wrapped around poems, paintings and post-socialist sculpture graveyards, the garden is overgrown with plants, herbs, flowers and weeds. As Giacomo Leopoldi says, “Everywhere you look, you will find pain”. We will visit with supremely accomplished as well as accidental gardeners, propagators, clodhoppers, and gleaners, both real and imaginary, including Medlar Lucan and Durian Gray, Hannah Höch, and Vita Sackville-West among numerous others. Alhena Katsof was Volkswagen Fellow at MoMA PS1 in New York from 2012 - 2013. In 2011 she was Museum as Hub Fellow at the New Museum in New York and she co-curated, with Dean Daderko, Directing Light onto Fist of Father, a solo exhibition by the artist MPA at Leo Koenig, Inc., which included a performance as part of Performa 2011.
Chris Domenick’s presentation, entitled Two and Monuments , will address topology and the complexities and difficulties of site-specificity. Focused on instances in which monuments are constructed for a site and subsequently severed from their place and rendered homeless, Domenick’s presentation will explore the possibilities of these nomadic objects. Might there be a place for language to go once it is displaced from its context? Where do we find these semantic refugee camps? Domenick will construct a metaphoric, linguistic, and actual map of signs that require us to understand the psychic as their primary site. Chris Domenick is an artist based in Queens, NY.
Sophia Cleary, a 2013 resident, will present I want to be inside you Part II , investigating masks, breath, organs, terrorism, balancing, urns, graves, dominance, and love. By assaulting the act of oration with dance, Sophia will conjure a performance with unusual emotional texture contingent upon the audience. She will develop her talk during her stay at the Shandaken Project. Cleary is a performance artist based in Brooklyn, NY. She is the founder and coordinator of the works-in-progress series REHEARSAL and is co-editor for Ugly Duckling Presse's performance annual Emergency INDEX.