The Portal

Reexamine the Space

Cori Olinghouse, Clown Therapy (2015). Studio practice improvisation shown in exhibition.

Conversation between Cori Olinghouse and Neal Beasley.

Conversation between Cori Olinghouse and Raja Feather Kelly.

Reexamine the space invites six artists whose work often takes the form of dance, performance or choreography to install work in the visual arts galleries at Abrons Arts Center. Works by Kim Brandt, Walter Dundervill & Iki Nakagawa, Moriah Evans, Dean Moss, Cori Olinghouse, and Julie Tolentino feature video, photography, sculpture, installation, and text, extending or augmenting each artists’ distinct and ongoing practice.

Each artist was invited to:

“consider the way dance materializes in mediums or forms other than live performance...to think about the relationship between performance, film and photography beyond the notion of a document or archive…to facilitate an experience of dance beyond conventional definitions or limits (i.e. the raising lowering of the “curtain”)”

Not traces, not documents, not archives, not performances, the resulting works are also not entirely art-objects in the most traditional sense. Yet they inhabit the gallery, using its distinctive structure and temporality to think anew the long tradition of dancers serving as the content for visual artworks. In that way they invite the viewer to reconsider the space between visual art and performance, a particularly poignant threshold at Abrons Arts Center, while contributing to a potent redefinition of “dance” within a field beyond the event of live performance.

In relation to the exhibition, a film screening of I Was A Male Yvonne de Carlo (1967 – 70) by Jack Smith will take place on the evening of Wednesday September 28th, 7pm. Film courtesy of Jack Smith Archive and Gladstone Gallery, New York and Brussels. Screening organized in partnership with Dirty Looks.