Series: Relative Intensity Noise
Performance: 02

This exhibition features the work of five time-based artists: Meredith Haines, Toni Kunst, Helen Lee, Rin Peisert, and Kezia Waters.

These artists create ephemeral works of live art. They work with objects and actions and present the artist’s body as living artistic material; both subject and object. These performances coexist within an enclosed social space and acknowledge the room as well as the artist’s relationship to the viewer/participant for exactly what they are. Here, artists expand and condense time; existing alongside each other while each engaging in distinctive poetic gestures. These works may appear disjointed, uneven, and asynchronous alongside each other in their actions and in their logic. They are simultaneously solos and collectively a group performance; revealing the plurality of temporalities.

“Temporality is obviously an organized structure, and these three so-called elements of time: past, present, future, must not be envisaged as a collection of ‘data’ to be added together…but as the structured moments of an original synthesis. Otherwise we shall immediately meet with this paradox: the past is no longer, the future is not yet, as for the instantaneous present, everyone knows that it is not at all:it is the limit of infinite division, like the dimensionless point.”

 – Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness

Artist Bios

Toni Kunst is a Black Trans interdisciplinary artist, scholar, director, and educator. She is currently a doctoral student in Performance Studies at Northwestern University. Additionally, Toni holds an MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, studied within the MFA in Acting program at DePaul University, and earned a BFA in Musical Theatre from Western Carolina University. As a performance practitioner and a director, her work has been exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Chicago, Illinois Humanities, The Center for Afrofuturist Studies, Co-Prosperity, Links Hall, Steppenwolf Theatre, Metropolis Theatre, Bay Street Theatre, Theatre Wit, and several other locations. Furthermore, Toni was an artist in residence at ADDS DONNA and Roman Susan, as well as a teaching artist at Governors State University, The National High School Institute, and First Stage.

Meredith Haines is a multidisciplinary artist and educator working with sound, installation, performance, and video. Her work engages the political capacities of sound, and explores noise as a method of social resistance. She has performed and exhibited work all over the country at venues such as No Nation, High Concept Labs, New Boone Gallery, AS220, Space 1026, and the DUMBO Dance Festival.

After earning a BFA in dance and choreography at Temple University and working as a musician in Philadelphia for over a decade, Meredith’s work led her to Chicago in 2019 to earn her Master’s in Sound Arts and Industries at Northwestern University on a merit scholarship. She is a current Fellow Artist-in-Residence at High Concept Labs in Chicago, Illinois, and also performs under the moniker, MAIR. Meredith is also the curator of the Soft Noise Skillshare, a bi-monthly workshop series highlighting women, trans, and non-binary sound artists and practitioners.

Helen Lee (she/they) creates performances resulting from deep investigations into the honoring, understanding and celebrating death, identity, and their ancestral lineage in Korea and Japan. Currently they are exploring performance art, dance, storytelling, video, taxidermy, and social practice as tools to dissect trauma, racism, grief, shame, anger and forgiveness  to nurture healing. Much of the work Helen creates is from her memories and experiences, and driven by a desire to create a way for others to look at their own memories, sit with them…and find acceptance and peace within them.

Rin Peisert is a time-based interdisciplinary artist who works with bodies, sounds, objects, and live actions to explore conditions for interdependence and sincerity. Her site-specific and relational actions use intervention and interaction as tools to reorganize behavior and to deconstruct and exaggerate the quotidian. Peisert’s performance work has been shown in Asia and the US at Shanghai Duolun Museum of Modern Art, Power Station of Art Shanghai, Ying Art Center, The Momentary Museum, and Defibrillator Art Gallery, and as well as street corners, rooftops, a bank vault, a bomb shelter, and a market for arranged marriages. Peisert has an MFA in Art Practice from School of Visual Arts in New York City. She co-produces the graphic score performance series, Image of Thought and is the Performing Arts Curatorial Artist in Residence at Elastic, curating this series, Relative Intensity Noise.

Kezia Dorsey Swann is a Storyteller, Conjurer, Director,  Folklorist and Multidisciplinary Artist. Time Traveling is not only a subject matter in most of their work but a method of creation/ a praxis/ a pedagogy. They push against, overlap and reject norms. Having grew up in The Black Pentecostal Church tradition, despite their queerness, they think of their work as trying to find that which is holy, whole, holistic and/ or holds within Black and/or Queer functionality. They do this often through spiritual surrealism and traditional folkloric techniques.

$15 – Tickets Available at the Door