Performance as Landscape
2020.3.13
Daniels Gallery, University of Toronto
Presented by The Kitchen Video Viewing Room
https://onscreen.thekitchen.org/media/beau-bree-rhee
https://www.daniels.utoronto.ca/events/2020/03/13/beau-rhee-performance-landscape-new-circadian-time-gesture-sound
"Paysage. le sable parfaitement distinct de l’eau du lac sous laquelle il se prolonge sans mélange… l’eau seul et le reflet d’une barque d’écorce: l’air. La separation parfait de des substances m’enchante."
-Poésie perdue / Lost Poems, by Paul Valéry (philosopher, poet, writer of Eupalinos or the Architect and Dance and the Soul).
“THE BODY is a cosmic and relational site; it is a porous space where we live in radical dependency to the world. I believe that a contemporary, poetic, and emotive art language is needed to make sense of our existence & the state of our Earth today. I approach the body as our main connection to our ecosystem. In my drawings, I work both figuratively and abstractly with these concepts of body-space.
Performance as Landscape (première 3.13.2020 at University of Toronto) stems from a philosophical frustration with the human-centric notion of performance itself. Of course, these desires & questions come from a deeply personal grief at being human now in this particular moment in our planet’s history, in the Anthropocene.
The piece is fundamentally about rage/grief related to climate change and themes of breath and loss/absentia. I wondered if it was possible through this performance to insert (and perhaps even transform) the human into a bigger flow & time of life, into the non-human, the lithic, the telluric. Art is made by and for humans, but it seems necessary to propose an alternative.”
-This is a short excerpt from the full text, which is published on The Kitchen Video Viewing Room.
The Viewing Room features 2 videos that document the performance & drawings / scores by the artist.
