Daily Practice.

Everyday I hold my breath; I reject life and stop the physical intake for as long as I can. The need to document such a practice never really occurred to me. I feel that the idea is so much more important than the actual act of holding my breath that this performance need not be documented but purely experienced and thought about. Perhaps if I were told that someone wanted to exhibit the word I would request that the text "reject that which gives you life" be visible some where, and the viewers could then perform on their own, or just think about it.

This work is to be seen as a comment on the living vs. the living. It can also be seen as an anti-consumer piece, however it’s not my intention to communicate this- not that that’s ever stopped anyone from appropriating his or her own thoughts before. This of course is the beauty of all art, opinion and experience.

(lose) control (of) yourself

Personal Documentation.

Painting A White Wall White

What is considered a 'waste of time'? At what point do we stop the mundane and evoke the chaos within?

By taking a small paintbrush and a large bucket of white house paint to paint an already white wall white, I attempted to illustrate the painstaking precision we put into the everyday, the events in our lives that occur on the regular and we allow for them to. I want to challenge the viewer to stay with me and watch white paint dry to the exact colour it’s being painted on. I intended to slowly build a sense of urgency as the realization that this monotonous act was going to take quite a while and they may not have the time to invest in such process.

An interesting observation I made after everyone had gone and I was left to finish the piece in solitude was the paintbrush actually wore away, this excited me because I realized the paintbrush became a symbol of spirit and how the continuous process was wearing it down. The final foot of the wall had to be completed via finger painting because the brush finally disappeared. The entire process took approximately four hours. I’d like to try this piece on a larger wall again using a small brush and painting with the same colours- I think the questions that one begins to ask themselves when participating in this performance are important ones that cannot always be asked of someone else, but must be called upon from the self. 

Festival Info

Performances by Molly Kreppel, Connie Freitas, Tomorrow Rising, Genesis y.m., G Am Ani, Emilio Rojas. The Fragility of Time and Space was a Festival that occured on March 31st 2010 at Emily Carr University of Art and Design. The fragility of time and space was a concept developed within the questions of time as a non-linear component of performance art, and as well as how the space occupies time just as much as time occupies space.
Short Description :

Emilio worked with the length of tape cassettes and using their physical properties to entrap and guide the audience, the physical time of the cassettes and real time were confronted.

Molly Kreppel danced aggressively and sparatic to a loop of a children song sped up, the time recorded was altered and made weak.

Tomorrow Rising painted the gallery space white during the Festival. Dealing with space and time within performance itself.

Genesis y.m. sanded down smooth a 24 by 42 cm rectangle on a white wall separated by a shutter light. Dealing with the time of the day (the sun outside causing the shadow light) as well as the time it took to sand down this portion of the wall, well the audience stood waiting, and the difference or effect of that time spent.

Connie Freitas combined video with performance, using voice and image with silhouette play between the form of her body against the forms in the video, while dealing with the concept of time as a fragile impassable matter.

G Am Ani sat partially nude within a plastic veil while reading, with tomatoes available to be thrown, smashed etc. on her at the audience’s desire, the space within her veil as well as the space in which the tomatoes were thrown was the focus of the audience.