Alix PEARLSTEIN's video and performance works exploit the legacies of minimalism, structuralist film and postmodern dance, to create an affective space between camera, viewer, and subject. She works with ensemble groups of actors, mining their professional skills and subjectivity to explore character, behavior, motivation, relationships, group dynamics and social constructs while foregrounding the codes of acting and performance.
She inserts acting into a space in which an expectation has been set up for performance, setting off the actor's subjectivity so that it may seem out of place or disjunctive within the context of the piece. She directs the viewer's attention to the actor as a person, to their attitude, appearance, personal characteristics and their approach to acting. Direct address, breaking through the 4th wall and gaze are employed towards this end. Implicit in this exchange are questions of identification, empathy, attraction or repulsion.
Pearlstein works with structures that may resemble the task-based actions of early performance art and post-modern dance, but towards more humanist objectives. Narrative is often stripped away, but then emerges out of intention, motivation and relationships. An exploration of the boundaries of the frame can give rise to conflicts between characters for access, territory, dominance and attention (look at me, look at me, look at me). Or affinities and affections may emerge.
In her work, the presence of the camera, it’s choreography, is constantly emphasized to position the viewer and to implicate them in the action. Cameras may be visible and may perform as intruders or participants. Simultaneity and real time shooting strategies reveal the mechanics of the process as a parallel theme while exploiting the immediacy, intimacy and contingency of a live performance. An article of clothing, the inflection of a single word or a gesture, the incidents on the edge of the central action deliver crucial clues to time, place and feeling, delineating a space where the spatial and psychological overlap.
Selected solo exhibitions include the Cordova Sculpture Park and Museum (Lincoln); Samsøn (Boston); Ballroom Marfa (Texas); the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center; On Stellar Rays (NY); Contemporary Art Museum (St. Louis); The Kitchen (NY); MIT List Visual Arts Center (Cambridge) and Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago). Her performances have been seen at Art Basel (Miami); Park Avenue Armory; Esopus Space and Salon 94 (NY).
Her works have been included in exhibitions at Whitechapel (London); MoCA (Miami); INOVA (Milwaukee); MoBY-Museums of Bat Yam (Israel); Internationale D’Art De Quebec; Annual Exhibition of Visual Art (Ireland); BAM/PFA (Berkeley); SMAK (Belgium); Whitney Museum of American Art (NY); ICA (Philadelphia); Biennale de Lyon (France) and MoMA (NY).
She is a recipient of the Foundation for Contemporary Arts 2011 Grants to Artists Award, is on the faculty of the MFA program at The School of Visual Arts (NY) and serves on the Board of Governors of The Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture.
About the video experience, her contribution to RE-ACTION, she has written: “Mayakovsky's text The Unclean creates a border that frames the image in Oreet Ashery's piece. The title "The Unclean", suggested enacting a removal, a wholesale wiping of the slate, or a purge of image. Here, the final word from that text -experience-fades in and out of the gritty, splattered field once also inhabited by Duchenne de Boulogne's tortured figures.”
Alix Pearlstein lives and works in NY and Orient (USA).
She inserts acting into a space in which an expectation has been set up for performance, setting off the actor's subjectivity so that it may seem out of place or disjunctive within the context of the piece. She directs the viewer's attention to the actor as a person, to their attitude, appearance, personal characteristics and their approach to acting. Direct address, breaking through the 4th wall and gaze are employed towards this end. Implicit in this exchange are questions of identification, empathy, attraction or repulsion.
Pearlstein works with structures that may resemble the task-based actions of early performance art and post-modern dance, but towards more humanist objectives. Narrative is often stripped away, but then emerges out of intention, motivation and relationships. An exploration of the boundaries of the frame can give rise to conflicts between characters for access, territory, dominance and attention (look at me, look at me, look at me). Or affinities and affections may emerge.
In her work, the presence of the camera, it’s choreography, is constantly emphasized to position the viewer and to implicate them in the action. Cameras may be visible and may perform as intruders or participants. Simultaneity and real time shooting strategies reveal the mechanics of the process as a parallel theme while exploiting the immediacy, intimacy and contingency of a live performance. An article of clothing, the inflection of a single word or a gesture, the incidents on the edge of the central action deliver crucial clues to time, place and feeling, delineating a space where the spatial and psychological overlap.
Selected solo exhibitions include the Cordova Sculpture Park and Museum (Lincoln); Samsøn (Boston); Ballroom Marfa (Texas); the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center; On Stellar Rays (NY); Contemporary Art Museum (St. Louis); The Kitchen (NY); MIT List Visual Arts Center (Cambridge) and Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago). Her performances have been seen at Art Basel (Miami); Park Avenue Armory; Esopus Space and Salon 94 (NY).
Her works have been included in exhibitions at Whitechapel (London); MoCA (Miami); INOVA (Milwaukee); MoBY-Museums of Bat Yam (Israel); Internationale D’Art De Quebec; Annual Exhibition of Visual Art (Ireland); BAM/PFA (Berkeley); SMAK (Belgium); Whitney Museum of American Art (NY); ICA (Philadelphia); Biennale de Lyon (France) and MoMA (NY).
She is a recipient of the Foundation for Contemporary Arts 2011 Grants to Artists Award, is on the faculty of the MFA program at The School of Visual Arts (NY) and serves on the Board of Governors of The Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture.
About the video experience, her contribution to RE-ACTION, she has written: “Mayakovsky's text The Unclean creates a border that frames the image in Oreet Ashery's piece. The title "The Unclean", suggested enacting a removal, a wholesale wiping of the slate, or a purge of image. Here, the final word from that text -experience-fades in and out of the gritty, splattered field once also inhabited by Duchenne de Boulogne's tortured figures.”
Alix Pearlstein lives and works in NY and Orient (USA).