An evening of individual performances at Monster Truck Gallery
{Culture Night} // 6-9pm // Free!
Smilin’ Kanker / Conor Foy / Aine O’Hara / Alan Delmar
On Culture Night 2012 Monster Truck Gallery will transform its gallery space into a platform to showcase a night of performance art. Four performances will take place back-to-back and viewed through the gallery’s street facing window.
Ciaran O’Keefe will perform his piece, Fame, through the character of Smilin’ Kanker. Fame deals with the daftness of reality TV and X-factor style ‘talent’ competitions where Warhol’s notion of 15 minutes has reached its bizarre dead end. Smilin’ Kanker, dressed in a yellow jumpsuit and decked out with dozens of ‘talent’ show i.d. tags performs the 70’s classic Fame over and over. The character’s desperation for success, love and attention pushs him towards an exhausted madness with each version of the song. O’Keefe’s performance work explores and attempts to close the gap between conceptual art and entertainment. His emphasis is on a genuine pathos and humour, the latter being something that is notably absent from contemporary Irish performance art.
Alan Delmar will perform a physically challenging work; the artist will be tied and bound with a large quantity of VHS magnetic tape. The intensity of the work increased along with Delmar’s overt struggle and amplified heavy breathing. Delmar sees the audience’s empathy for his struggle as a form of collaboration between the performer and the viewer. The performance will deal with issues of memory. VHS, a recurrent material in Delmar’s practice, is representative of a past, a recorded past that cannot be truly seen or understood by only looking at it. The 15-minute performance will expose the artist’s acute presence in the space and moment in time.
Aine O’Hara will perform The Owl that lost the cat. Currently studying Visual Arts Practice at IADT O’Hara’s interest in blurring boundaries between theatre and performance art influenced this piece. A fictional character, named Anna, dressed up in an over sized head of an owl will move through a narrative referencing childhood, being lost and anonymity. The 30-minute performance will consist of the character building a fort in the space out of things from her home and some natural materials (sheets, pieces of wood, colourful fabrics, cushions, cling film, clothes) as well as other people’s stories (printed on long reams of paper). The work will be partially scripted and has elements of improvisation.
Finally, Conor Foy’s piece Observance, a 20-minute delegated performance, will involve a two performance carrying out what resembled a ceremony, séance or tarot card reading. Origins of myth and ritual are looked at as well as precarious and shifting ideas of the future. Slow and solemn movement and interaction between the two performers dressed in shiny gold and silver pointy hats will be simultaneously sound tracked by futuristic sounding electronic music and warped yet recognizable hits from the 1990s.