Labor Day Lectures 2015

Hosted by Shandaken: Storm King

Sunday, September 6, 2015

Beginning at the Storm King Visitor Center

Continuing at the Shandaken: Storm King campus

Tickets and camping free, but limited

Shandaken Projects invites you to join us sixty minutes north of New York City for our fourth annual Labor Day weekend collaboration with The Center for Experimental Lectures, this year also including a collaboration with Adult Contemporary, featuring new work by Chelsea Knight, Martine Syms, Amelia Bande, and Jeannine Tang.

Limited passes for free entry to Storm King are available on a first-come, first-served basis.

10am—Storm King opens with free admission (with RSVP only) for guests of this program

3pm at the Storm King Visitor Center—Chelsea Knight's What Is a Document? will reconfigure the sculpture park's objects and surroundings, slipping them away from their official histories and engaging alternative approaches to their origins. Produced from research undertaken during Knight's time at Shandaken: Storm King, What Is a Document? will commingle improvised fictions with recorded histories. She asks: what are fixed things, words, memories, and desires? How does a new idea, proposition or belief become a tautology? What happens when we establish legitimacy for a thing, then allow that legitimacy to collapse? The piece forms a one-thing-leads-to-the-next narrative that will inevitably wind away from the objects in the park as the audience walks among them. This portion of the program is presented by Center for Experimental Lectures.

6pm at Shandaken: Storm King—Amelia Bande will read and perform fragments of Make The Bed, a close-up on the experience of looking for a home through internet groups for the queer community. How do we describe ourselves in order to belong? What are the contradictions implicit in that language? These groups promise a filter, rooms offered for people just like us, while at the same time becoming virtual platforms for frustration and isolation. This portion of the program is presented by Adult Contemporary.

7pm—Shandaken: Storm King will offer a simple BBQ dinner to guests.

After sunset—Jeannine Tang has been writing a letter to a friend as part of their ongoing conversation on everyday life, intimacy, and capitalism. Occasioned by the affective atmospheres surrounding the Supreme Court gay marriage ruling, and with reference to queer histories of kinship and care, their conversations have explored how systemic and affective vocabularies of love generate libidinal critiques devoted to socio-sexual and economic flourishing. This current draft details some reflections on love's infrastructures and conditions, its jelly of contact and communication. This portion of the program is presented by Adult Contemporary.

Martine Syms describes her Misdirected Kiss as follows: “I’ve been researching a set of gestures first studied by John Bulwer in 1644. I came across Bulwer’s texts Chirologia and Chironomia while looking for information about acting techniques. I was thinking about the similarities and differences between real movements and movements made for camera. I started comparing Bulwer’s index to YouTube videos and animated GIFs featuring black women. How did I learn to move? I modeled myself after the women in my family, celebrities, and public figures. I had learned by looking, by being a witness. These images had accumulated in my body.” This portion of the program is presented by Center for Experimental Lectures.

The Center for Experimental Lectures is an artist's project by Gordon Hall that provides a platform for artists, theorists, and other cultural producers to engage with the public lecture as a format. Since 2011 the Center for Experimental Lectures has commissioned 24 new lecture-performances at a variety of venues including Alderman Exhibitions (Chicago), Recess (NYC), MoMA PS1, and at the Whitney Museum of American Art presenting Seminars with Artists in conjunction with the 2014 Whitney Biennial. An archive including video and written transcripts can be found on the archive page of the website at experimentallectures.org.

Adult Contemporary is an experimental non/fiction salon series featuring readings, lectures, performances and interviews with and by established and emerging writers and artists. Adult Contemporary asks participants from a variety of disciplines to "read" in whatever way they see fit, to use the platform to experiment in form, to give us words, movements, sounds, or textures.