On-holding (performance)
@ Aspect/Ratio
119 N Peoria Street #3D, Chicago IL
Opening Friday, February 12th, from 6PM - 7PM
Aspect/Ratio is delighted to present On-Holding, a series of performances and installation work from Michal Samama. In her new performance-exhibition, Michal Samama will transform the gallery space into a gallery space. Michal Samama creates body-based art, incorporating movement, everyday objects, sound, text and site-specific practices. Her work moves between the theater, the gallery and the public space, exploring the different dynamics by which these spaces are capable of ‘framing’ art.
From the gallery space in its totality, including back rooms and offices, to the smallest of nail holes on the wall, the performer’s body and the objects in the gallery, although fully present, intimate contact with what is absent; giving body to the fullness of the hole, as it were, dwelling in “negative space.” Gravity behaves differently there, giving levity to what seems most somber and immobile, and bearing most heavily the more we approximate the weightless. Populating the gallery are generic,charmless objects, items of vulgar consumption: a plastic garden table, iron nails, a breast pump, plastic tags. On-Holding is a balancing act, a struggle to hold together in suspense an excess of elements and objects all pulling in different directions and assert- ing their partiality.
Michal Samama is an Israeli born, Chicago based artist who recently presented works at Theatre de la Ville in Paris, Aspect/Ratio Gallery in Chicago, Intima-Dance and Curtain Up Festivals in Tel Aviv and was com- missioned by The Chocolate Factory Theater in New York. In Chicago, her work has been presented at Julius Caesar Gallery, EXPO CHICAGO 2014, 6018 North Gallery, Rapid Pulse Festival 2014 and TBSO3 at Defibrillator Gallery, Out of Site 2015, Mana Contemporary, Links Hall, TRITRIANGLE and Northwestern University. In New York she presented her work at New York Live Arts, Movement Research at Judson Church, Performance Mix Festival, Dixon Place, Joyce SoHo, CPR, Chez Bushwick, Priska C. Juschka Gallery, AUNTS and the 92nd Street Y, where she also curated Sunday At Three in January 2012. Samama is a graduate of the MFA performance program at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is the recipient of SAIC 2013-15 New Artist Society Scholarship Award, Edes Semi-Finalist Fellowship Award and the James Nelson Raymond fellowship.
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