Separticipation – Art Showcase
Tuesday, Dec. 9, 2014 – 6:00PM – 9:00PM
Holding House
3546 Michigan Avenue
Detroit, MI
Are we inviting you in or leaving it up to you to decide to enter? Will you just look at the artwork or actively participate in it? Is looking in-itself an act of participation? Can you find the artwork on your own or do you need a map? Is no explanation of the artwork good enough or do you need some didactics to help orient? Do you believe that the question ‘Is it art?’ still needs to be asked or are we past that concern? Does the separation between art and life really exist? How does the situation you find yourself in, the artspace or the street, or everything that happened today or yesterday, change your experience of the artwork? Is a re-performance or a copy of an artwork simply a replica of the original, or is it new when the maker and context changes? What can be learned from these polarities, and are they really opposites or are they interwoven into the fabric of the art experience?
These are some of the questions that are being asked, pondered or underlie the framework of the exhibition Separticipation. This exhibition comes as the final project for bachelors students in the course Installation/Performance/Site taught through the Fine Arts Department at the College for Creative Studies, Detroit. This course charted a history of installation, context specific art, performance and socially engaged practice, and the critiques and disputes within these ways of working. It encouraged students to explore these strategies of contemporary artistic production through reading, exercises, discourse, research and presentations. And most directly, through the production of three projects engaging with these areas of concern, Project 1: Documents of Site/Context Specificity, Project 2: Re-Performance and Project 3: Live Engagement.
The artworks in Separticipation, Project 3 of our class, have been produced to engage directly with live audiences through a diversity of strategies. Some artists have created direct interactions via performance or socially engaged projects, some have built spaces or environments for audiences to explore and change their perspective, and in several instances artists have purposefully hidden the work or created acts that conspicuously separate them from the audience. It is an exhibition that combines the competing strategies of invitation and rejection.
Participating artists: Victoria Bayagich, Alyssa Bogdan, Michelle Carpenter, Laura Hidalgo, Jenna Kempinski, Ashley Meunchen, Kasper Ray, Michael Robinson, Nicole Shepherd, Lisa ¬Tolstyka, and Leah Willis
Curated by Anthony Marcellini
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Melissa DiVietri
Art Blogger
