Not Like the Other, A Performance Art Event curated by BrandonCover Photo: Featured Artist Katya PetETSKAya
THE POLITICAL SEDUCER'S DIARY
aN INSTAGRAM-BASED performance art evenT
Nov 4th - December 19th, 2017
FOLLOW @performancearthouston
on Instagram to experience the show
Individual artists take up residency in Performance Art Houston’s Instagram account and facilitate performances and gestures as their works within the show. Every week, the account passes hands to a new artist who will then begin with their performances.
FEATURING WORK BY:
VINCENT CAMPOS 4 – 10 NOV
BROOKE LEIGH 11 – 17 NOV
STEVEN MARTZ 18 – 24 NOV
JEANETTE JOY HARRIS, 25 NOV – 1 DEC
RYDER RICHARDS 2 – 8 DEC
DANIEL CABALLERO 9 – 15 DEC
KATYA PETETSKAYA 16 – 22 DEC
YOSHIE SAKAI 23 - 29 DEC
VINCENT CAMPOS 4 – 10 NOV
BROOKE LEIGH 11 – 17 NOV
STEVEN MARTZ 18 – 24 NOV
JEANETTE JOY HARRIS, 25 NOV – 1 DEC
RYDER RICHARDS 2 – 8 DEC
DANIEL CABALLERO 9 – 15 DEC
KATYA PETETSKAYA 16 – 22 DEC
YOSHIE SAKAI 23 - 29 DEC
Curated by Jeanette Joy Harris
https://jeanettejoyharris.me/
WorDS FROM THE CURATOR:
"Nineteenth century Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard wrote The Seducer’s Diary as a description of what he called the “aesthetic” life.
Using the courtship of a man and a young woman as a literary device, Kierkegaard articulates a worldview where appearance, overintellectualization, emotional ambiguity, mood, and manipulation provide the basis for enjoyment. Reason, morality, and religion are abandoned in favor of passion, desire, and pleasure.
Kierkegaard’s critique of aesthetics as a personal ethic in The Seducer’s Diary can be used as a contemporary framework to evaluate how aesthetics influence us when making important political decisions.
If appearances have the power to blind us, if beautiful words can confuse us, and if choreographed experiences can cause us to lose sight of a larger, diverse world, how does aesthetic thinking and acting get in the way of creating and maintaining public life?
The goal of this project is to investigate the connection between the aesthetic, seduction, and the political."
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Vincent Campos
Vincent Campos is a French visual artist with a Masters in Fine Art from the Dijon Art School. His practice includes performance, installation, ceramics and sound. He focuses on a materials potentiality, absurdity and repercussion and likes to create connections and interactions with spectators. He began studying violin at 13 and has used his playing to create urban experiences where landscapes, differences in scale, the body, and negative space all work together. He also likes telling stories, illustrating, serigraphy, and etching. He has performed for festivals in France, the Netherlands, Norway, Germany, and Italy.
Brooke LEigh
Brooke Leigh is an Australian artist and a Master of Fine Arts candidate at Sydney College of the Arts (USYD). By investigating repressed memories and anxiety through processes of drawing, Leigh’s work explores ways in which the performative act or event can become a cathartic experience. Working at liminal states of the body, she explores the performative gesture through writing, drawing, print-making, live performance, video and audio installation. Leigh has exhibited and performed in Australia, Belgium, Lithuania, Italy, Spain, and the UK.
Doc Smartz
DOC SMARTZ WaS Born in the cold and windy wilds of Canada, in the hometown of Wayne Gretzky AND began his journey with a trip to Australia when he was 20. There he met a group of traveling evangelists and joined a breakaway group in the jungles of Fiji. Stints in Switzerland and a (very) small town outside of Calgary, Alberta followed where he worked as a landscaper, cement man, youth employment and tourism coordinator, Teaching Assistant and editor of a paper. Moving to Edinburgh to pursue his graduate education, Doc Smartz completed his PhD in 2012. His research focused on 18th and 19th century German and Danish philosophy (Hamann, Kant, Kierkegaard, and others) looking specifically at questions around freedom, reason and language. He remains committed to academic pursuits, teaching Existentialism at Edinburgh University, organizing public philosophy groups and generally attempting to corrupt the minds of the youths.
Jeanette Joy Harris
Jeanette Joy Harris is a Houston-based artist, writer, curator and speaker interested in the intersection of performance and political dialogue. Joy completed her MscR in history of art at University of Edinburgh College of Art where her dissertation on performance artists as creators of judicial bodies earned her a mark of distinction. She earned a BA in government, with a minor in philosophy, from Texas Woman’s University and focused on political theory and Continental thinkers like Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger. She was a scholar in residence at the Hannah Arendt Institute at Bard College.
Joy has presented papers at University of Cambridge, University of Brighton, University of Edinburgh, and the Hannah Arendt Circle on a variety of topics including the precarious tension between performances as works of art versus political action. She regularly guest lectures at Texas Woman’s University. Recent topics include protest art and the imagery of lynching and performance art as an enabler and dissembler of fascism and totalitarianism.
Joy’s art practice is project-based. Research points her to challenging issues where she develops multi-discipline responses between thinkers, performers, and participants. A recent project includes a photo, video and installation work centered around gentrification in East Downtown Houston through the lens of discotecas (dance clubs). She has shown work in London, the Netherlands, Venice, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland, Miami, Chicago, and Houston. Joy workshopped with the International Performance Association in conjunction with Venice International Performance Art Week (Italy).
Joy recently curated a web-based performance art series for Our Prime Property focused on the idea of place and location. Joy has written for multiple publications including Glasstire, TribTalk (Texas Tribune), Performance Philosophy, Beautiful Decay, This is Tomorrow, and Illusion.
Joy has presented papers at University of Cambridge, University of Brighton, University of Edinburgh, and the Hannah Arendt Circle on a variety of topics including the precarious tension between performances as works of art versus political action. She regularly guest lectures at Texas Woman’s University. Recent topics include protest art and the imagery of lynching and performance art as an enabler and dissembler of fascism and totalitarianism.
Joy’s art practice is project-based. Research points her to challenging issues where she develops multi-discipline responses between thinkers, performers, and participants. A recent project includes a photo, video and installation work centered around gentrification in East Downtown Houston through the lens of discotecas (dance clubs). She has shown work in London, the Netherlands, Venice, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland, Miami, Chicago, and Houston. Joy workshopped with the International Performance Association in conjunction with Venice International Performance Art Week (Italy).
Joy recently curated a web-based performance art series for Our Prime Property focused on the idea of place and location. Joy has written for multiple publications including Glasstire, TribTalk (Texas Tribune), Performance Philosophy, Beautiful Decay, This is Tomorrow, and Illusion.
Ryder Richards
Ryder Richards is a Dallas-based artist who was a fellow at Roswell Artist-in-Residence from September 2012 until August 2013, held the art department chair at Eastfield College in Mesquite, TX, and is now an independent artist. Richards is a co-founder of the RJP NOMADIC GALLERY (a traveling art gallery), CULTURE LABORATORY (internet based collective exhibiting internationally) and Dallas-based group THE ART FOUNDATION. He has curated and exhibited in numerous exhibitions (including an exhibition at the Dallas Museum of Art) and is the recipient of several scholarships, travels abroad, and awards for his achievements in art, including seven artist-in-residence programs, including the Roswell Artist-in-Residence (2012-2013). Writing for Glasstire.com, D Magazine, and other publications prompted Richards to found Eutopia: Contemporary Art Review focused on concise arts writing. Richards has exhibited at the Bellevue Museum, Seattle; Roswell Museum, Roswell, NM; Olm Space, Switzerland; Public Address, Brooklyn; Antena, Chicago; Falling Water, Pennsylvania; Cornell University, Ithaca; Monkskirche, Tangermunde, Germany; C2 Pottery Gallery, China; Blue Star Contemporary Art Museum, San Antonio; ArtPace, San Antonio; The Luminary, St. Louis ; Lawndale, Houston; Amarillo Museum of Art; San Diego Art Institute; The London Art Fair; as well as The Power Station, The Reading Room, Beefhaus, and Gray Matters in Dallas. He has participated in The Texas Biennial 2011 and 2013 and the Dallas Biennial 2012 and 2014. Richards has works in the permanent collections of The Anderson Contemporary Museum, Roswell Museum, McNeese University, Richland College, and several private collectors.
DanieL CABALLERO
Daniel Caballero is a multidisciplinary artist from Los Angeles whose practice examines interpersonal relations and cultural doctrines. Caballero forensically investigates these structures to implement transparency and expand the scope of intimacy. Through performance, Caballero engages the body and its absence as a site of confrontation and provocation, where access is privileged and acute vulnerability is facilitated. Cross generational inheritances of ritual, ceremony, and offerings are restructured from the oppressive residue of postcolonial Mexico and Philippines. Caballero’s excavation of image and text formulate a decryption, making the viewer not only complicit, but non-singular, and non-passive.
Katya Petetskaya
Katya Petetskaya is a visual artist who works predominantly in painting and visual art performance. Born and raised in Russia she now lives and works in Australia while frequently undertaking projects in other parts of the world. Rather than focusing on finding her roots, she explores the ambiguous state of belonging. Petetskaya’s paintings combine the language and materials of landscape painting, while disrupting traditional readings of this genre. Usually created in digital plein air using bright colour palettes, the paintings are hybrid versions of landscape and abstraction, with no reference to any particular location or time. In her performance practice, Petetskaya explores alternative forms of knowledge that go beyond thought, in at attempt to understand the co-relation between body and reality. Petetskaya has a Master of Art with a concentration in painting from UNSW Art and Design, Sydney. She held her first solo exhibition at Airspace Projects in Sydney in 2016 and has been part of collaborations and group shows in Sydney, Venice, Athens, The Hague, Saas Fee, St Petersburg and Leipzig.
YOSHIE SAKAI
Yoshie Sakai is a Southern California-based artist whose work includes video, sculpture, installation and performance. She has held residency at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and has an MFA from Claremont Graduate University. She has a BFA from California State University, Long Beach, a BA in Ancient Greek and Latin from UCLA, and a BA in Communication Studies from UCLA. Yoshie’s work creates an uneasy environment that embodies her love-hate relationship with consumerism and pop culture and how they simultaneously perpetuate both ecstasy and extreme anxiety in quotidian life. In her work she explores humor as a complicated intersection where hope, happiness, anxiety, and darkness reside, much like in our society, as a tension-filled existence of both criticality and complacency.