An artist’s process of searching to discover a yet unknown truth to herself and her viewers can be simultaneously exhilarating, challenging, and inspiring. Coe Lapossy is embarking on this path and has graciously invited us to come along for the ride.
My project for Brink v.2 is titled Meg/Sydney/Alec. About halfway into the project, I began to think of it more like a play, with a cast of characters and four acts. The action is taken from both the classic sawn-in-half woman illusion, and the film Prelude to a Kiss (1992). Both references involve a wide exploration of what can be experienced by the human body: body swapping and segmenting the body. This painting/sculpture/performance/video is excavating painting as a material itself, but also excavating these stories and illusions, blurring age, gender, and bodily experience.
I visit the Mills Gallery each day, building a mass from paint bricks that is then covered with wet paint. This paint mass dries into one solid form that will be sawn into segments during a performance March 12, 2016. The physical struggle to saw these objects is a way to get closer to them, to build intimacy with them. I look inside, dig through the sediment, over the course of three months I get closer, and cut deeper, in order to understand the paintings inside.
In addition to the performance, visitors to the gallery may ask for my phone number in order to text me directly and I will send them short video clips of objects in the show speaking and acting.
The show is curated by John Pyper and includes the work of six artists: Johnny Adimando, Samantha Fields, Coe Lapossy, AJ Liberto, Steven Pestana and J.R. Uretsky. The show catalog is also available to order.
BRINK v2: Space and Intimacy
Boston Center for the Arts, Mills Gallery
Hours: Wednesday, 12–5pm; Thursday-Saturday, 12–9pm; Sunday, 12–5pm
All images courtesy of Coe Lapossy.
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