Author: Ariel Zaccheo

ATA Window Gallery presents Almost Public / Semi-Exposed 7 [Video Edition]
November 12 – December 15, 2020

Each November, Artists’ Television Access hosts Almost-Public/Semi-Exposed our annual showcase of public facing performance art installed in the ATA Window Gallery. For the past six years we have presented a wide spectrum of performances including durational dance, physical endurance art, Butoh, avant-garde burlesque, living sculpture, ritual performance, performative writing, experimental music, art games, and other performance forms to crowds that would gather around the window to take a break from their errands, shopping, and dates to take in an unexpected art experience.

Due to the uncertainty of the Covid-19 pandemic we don’t feel comfortable risking performer and audience health by proceeding with our normal November of live performance. We’ve decided to split this year’s Almost-Public/Semi-Exposed into two sessions, a November session dedicated to performance video and a delayed Spring session marking the hopeful return of live performance to the ATA Window Gallery.

Presented with the generous support of The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and the Phyllis C. Wattis Foundation.

Schedule:

Nov 11 – 13 Eliana Dianda IN HER OWN IMAGE Eliana Dianda is a writer and visual artist currently based in San Diego. Her most recent work, IN HER OWN IMAGE, is a three-part series of performances for camera. The work embodies her research on how contemporary female performance and musical artists appropriate Catholic symbols and rituals to create a more expansive female futurity. In these performances, she also explores the trauma from her Catholic faith and education backgrounds as a queer, mentally ill woman.
Nov 14 – 16 Alien Mac Kitty (AMK) Straight from outer-space to San Francisco! My name is A.M.K which stands for ALIEN MAC KITTY. I make vibes for beings like myself and unlike myself. I’m just here to shift and uplift. My goal is to connect beyond the physical with LOVE. Feel free to follow my IG- ALIENMACKITTY & catch these vibes. LOVE YOU.
Nov 17 – 19 Claire Bain, Evelyn Eeling, Alfred Hernández FS172020 “FS172020 COVID19 Edition” is the latest in a line of performative works developed by Claire Bain and Alfred Hernandez, a result of two decades of collaborating performance. FS17 in this case can best be described as Figure Streams. Guest artist Evelyn Eeling performs dance with us in cubicle spaces at Art Explosion studios, to echo the cube box form of ATA‘s window. Alfred Hernandez could not perform in person due to transportation issues caused by COVID-19, so he was present via Zoom. Metaphors galore, with a through-line of red. A silent, 13 minute condensed version of the original 45 minute performance.
Nov 20 – 23 Lisa Frankenstein Lisa Frankenstein for you Would you like a description of me or my number?
Nov 24 – 26 Selby Sohn & Sarah Borruso Watching You / Watching Me, 2020 Watching You/Watching Me (2020) is a performance piece by Sarah Borruso and Selby Sohn. Selby and Sarah have been thinking about Zoom in terms of the Double Recursion Model: the ‘I know, that you know, that I know, that you know.’ Zoom is a much shallower version: it is an ‘I am watching you, as you are watching me, watch myself.’ Sarah and Selby have been performing this to each other almost every weekend since the pandemic started. The following video documentation is a compilation of four of these performances.
Nov 27 – 29 Lawrence Lindell
Nov 30 – Dec 2 Jenell Del Cid Plastic Flower Plastic flower is a myth/fairy tale examining not only bigotry and hatred but also the escape into the fantasy plastic world of our own curated media environments. The sometimes therapeutic effects of our fantasy worlds but also the inrush of grim reality that finds us no matter how far we plunge into our social media comfort zones.
Dec 3 – 5 Squid Ink Under Siege
Dec 6 – 8 Adrian Pijoan Visions of Homeworld Visions of Homeworld explores the Reptilian homeplanet as seen through the eyes of Terry, a shapeshifting Reptilian who has spent his entire life on Earth working a 9 to 5 office day job. This is the Reptilian homeworld as it appears to Terry in his dreams and childhood memories of its futuristic cities, majestic mountains, thermal vents, and twin suns. The Reptilians are frequently depicted as a purely evil extraterrestrial species in the world of UFO research, and they have featured heavily as the villains in rightwing conspiracy theories in recent years. Visions of Homeworld is one part of a larger body of work where I explore the Reptilians in a more empathetic light to reclaim these beings and offer a gentler vision of extraterrestrials.
Dec 9 – 11 Perel
Dec 12 – 15 Mirabelle Jones What Happens Next Will Be Documented by Images and Text What Happens Next Will Be Documented by Images and Text is a series of performances composed by an artificial intelligence and performed by a human. In this twelve hour durational performance, Jones will live stream a series of impromptu performances written by GPT-3: the largest language model in existence. The performances were generated in response to the prompt “An idea for a performance art piece:”. OpenAI’s GPT-3 uses machine learning to produce texts which are difficult to distinguish from those by humans. The language model was trained on the largest dataset of any to-date including articles, books, blog entries, and other texts sourced from the internet. As a result, however, GPT-3’s text sometimes reflects the statements and ideas of the internet and its human authors including biases, prejudices, and sometimes hateful or toxic output. This has resulted in some controversy around GPT-3 adding to existing concerns about artificial intelligence’s increasing presence in our lives. This series of performances touches upon these issues as well as the relationship between technology and the body, authorship and identity, and AI creativity vs. reproduction ultimately asking: what makes performance art performance art? What works of performance art might an artificial intelligence generate? And what can those performances tell us about ourselves and the words we immortalize online?

ATA Window Gallery presents Anna Landa, The Fear
October 10 – November 10, 2020

Stoic philosophers, such as Marcus Aurelius, believed that without an ever-present sense of death, life would be insipid. Anna Landa’s sound work ‘The Fear’ embodies this line of thinking, challenging viewers to contemplate their own mortality at a moment of collective uncertainty. Her installation is a celebration of existence in all of its messiness, the moments that came before as well as those yet to come. In acknowledging life’s finite nature, it is imbued with value and meaning. 

Like clockwork, the heart defines the duration of a life with its regular rhythm. Landa has harnessed her temporary nature by creating a countdown synced to an audio track of her own recorded heartbeat. The work was inspired by her lifelong preoccupation with mortality, and fueled by a scientific study that found all mammals to have approximately 1.5 billion heartbeats over the span of a lifetime. Humans also shared this trait before recent advances in hygiene and healthcare significantly lengthened their lives. The countdown began in 2012, and is accessible online for the approximately forty-two years it will run before the screen goes blank. With this work, Landa hopes to invite a sense of curiosity by pointing to impermanence as inherent, and to inspire reflection and discourse on the often overlooked moments that saturate our existence. 

The installation resembles a dining room, with a table set for dinner and a television in the corner. The table settings are coated in white paint and attached to a white table cloth as though frozen in time, along with the remnants of a dinner party like crumpled napkins and ashtrays with cigarette butts. A projector angled downward displays a pre-recorded dinner party, precisely mapped to the blank canvas of the white table settings, creating an eerie combination of 3D objects and 2D projections interacting. Sounds of laughter, conversation, and music are faintly audible in the background, as though from a distant memory or a dream. In this period of extreme social disconnection, Landa’s goal is to create a work that captures the shared experience of existence. She wants to acknowledge the anxiety of the moment while emphasizing the traditions of caring and connection that transcend sociopolitical pressures within the community.

Bio:

Anna Landa immigrated to the United States from the former Soviet Union with her family in the late 1980s as Soviet policies became more restrictive towards Jews. Experiencing the world from the viewpoint of an “other,” her artistic interests were shaped by the need to seek out commonalities between people across cultures. She received her BFA in Art and Design from California Polytechnic State University and currently resides in the San Francisco Bay Area where she continues to expand her practice to include aspects of science and technology. Landa has held solo shows at Christopher Henry Gallery in NYC, The Growlery and Savernack St. Gallery in San Francisco, and contributed works to exhibitions at Aggregate Space, Root Division and Minnesota Street Projects. Additionally, her interactive pieces have been featured at the California Academy of Sciences.

Ella (visual artist) and Hien (movement artist) engage in weekly conversation of the intersection and integration of art practices, philosophy, spirituality, celestial bodies, intentionality, cultural history, family history, dreams, and nightmares.

Through their exchanges and conversation they wonder what arises and manifests in the in-between, the under-neaths, how do we access and share. 

Through the ATA Window Gallery, Ella and Hien will perform for 4 accumulating evenings in March 2020. These series of sharings offers both visual and kinetic space where the viewer is invited to witness a live conversation of movement and visual arts in a container. We wonder what echoes and emanate waves beyond the walls.

Performance Dates:

March 04 7:30pm

March TBD

March TBD

March TBD

For more information look up Hien Huynh at hien-huynh.com or follow him on Instagram:  @__.hien 

For more information look up Ella Noe at ellanoe.com or follow her on Instagram: @ellanoeart