Performing the Grid - Opening Reception

Join us for the Opening Reception, Saturday January 23, 4-6pm at the Ben Maltz Gallery at Otis College of Art and Design Neil Beloufa, Lucinda Childs with Sol LeWitt and Philip Glass, Charles Gaines, David Haxton, Channa Horwitz, Xylor Jane, Rudolf Laban, Dashiell Manley, Debra McCall, Rebecca Morris, Bruce Nauman, Kelly Nipper, Heather Rowe, Emily Roysdon, Kathleen Ryan, and Emmett Williams. 'Performing the Grid' brings together an intergenerational group of artists and cultural producers that utilize the grid as a performative strategy to examine, challenge and position philosophical, political, social, domestic, corporeal, mythical and ideological perspectives. Rosalind Kraus famously wrote that the grid "functions to declare the modernity of modern art" in her 1979 essay, Grids. The grid has played a historical role in conceptual and minimalist art practices and continues to motivate and engage artists today. As we delve deeper into technology, a culture of images, violence, and surveillance, how do we locate presence inside of the grid? How is the self presented within the grid? Can intimacy be made visible? The included works in Performing the Grid access, address, reject and evoke the grid using video, performance, documentation, sound, sculpture, painting and installation. We're also pleased to announce a line up of events in conjunction with the exhibition: Screening | Bauhaus Dances, 1986 presented by Debra McCall Sunday, February 7, 2016, 4pm, Otis Forum | Free Performing the Grid artist Debra McCall screens her 1986 film of reconstructions of Oskar Schlemmer's 1920s Bauhaus Dances in their entirety and describes her process of rediscovering the original notes and sketches, visiting the Bauhaus in East Germany and reconstructing the pieces with the help of Ise Gropius and Andreas Weininger, the last remaining performer from the original Bauhaus Stage Workshop. Hailed by the New York Times as a “tour de force” of research and performance and as “prophetic,” the dances premiered at The Kitchen in New York in 1982 and The Solomon R Guggenheim Museum in conjunction with a Kandinsky exhibition in 1984. After sold-out tours of the US, Europe and Japan, McCall's reconstructions returned to the original Dessau Bauhaus in 1994, presenting the dances on that stage for the first time in sixty-five years. For more info about the Bauhaus Dances www.bauhausdances.org. Lecture | Hannah Higgins: The Grid Book Tuesday, March 8, 2016, 7pm, Otis Forum | Free Hannah Higgins, Associate Professor in the Department of Art History at the University of Illinois at Chicago, lectures on her 2009 MIT Press publication, The Grid Book, which examines the history of ten grids that changed the world: the brick, the tablet, the gridiron city plan, the map, musical notation, the ledger, the screen, movable type, the manufactured box, and the net. Lecture | MPA: Interrupting the Grid Sunday, April 10, 2016, 5pm, Otis Forum | Free MPA is an artist who has explored a range of meditative, durational, theatrical, and actionist modes of performance to engage "the energetic" as a potential material in live work. Enriched with ritual, MPA's performances and installations critically examine behaviors of power in individual and social spaces. She has proposed questions on the global arms race, patriarchy as governance, and the dysfunctional union of art with capitalist commodity. MPA lives in 29 Palms, CA, and is currently at work on a solo exhibition THE INTERVIEW: Red, Red Future that questions the colonial implications of possible past and future life on the planet Mars. More info can be found here: http://www.otis.edu/ben-maltz-gallery