Franklin Furnace’s Goings On
A special Goings On for Monday, December 8
Franklin Furnace announces this year’s recipients of the FRANKLIN FURNACE FUND FOR PERFORMANCE ART 2003-04!
This year Franklin Furnace received over 300 proposals from 25 countries.
Six artists /collaborations were selected to receive $5,000 each to complete their projects.
THE FRANKLIN FURNACE FUND FOR PERFORMANCE ART 2003-04
Since 1985, Franklin Furnace has awarded grants to emerging artists, allowing them to produce major work in New York in the coming year. The Franklin Furnace Fund for Performance art is supported by Jerome Foundation and the New York State Council on the Arts.
This year’s FUNDWINNERS are:
Vivian Babuts (Dewitt, New York)
Grupo 609 (Havana, Cuba)
Stefanie Trojan (Munchen, Germany)
Tobaron Waxman (Brooklyn, New York)
Lois Weaver (New York City), Leslie Hill (Middlesex, UK), Helen Paris (Middlesex, UK)
Adrianne Wortzel (New York City)
Franklin Furnace has no curator; each year a new panel of artists reviews all proposals. We believe that this peer panel system allows all kinds of artists from all over the world an equal shot at presenting their work. This year’s esteemed selection panel of artists, Deborah Edmeades, Zhang Ga, Tiffany Ludwig, Ricardo Miranda Zuñiga, and William Pope.L, met on June 18th, 19th and 20th, 2003.
ARTIST’S BIOGRAPHIES AND PROJECT DESCRIPTIONS
FUND FOR PERFORMANCE ART WINNERS, 2003-04
Vivian Babuts (Dewitt, New York)
Biography:
Vivian Babuts is a performance artist and photographer. Since 1995 she has been photographing radical and contemporary women performance artists, while performing her own solo work. Babuts’ work explores the identity of the “other,” and delves into issues of rage, deviance, illness, and the divine. She has presented her work at various locations and spaces throughout New York City including Dixon Place, WOW Café Theater, and LaMama Theater-annex. Most recently she has lectured and performed at the 12th Annual Matrilineage Symposium at Syracuse University. In the summer of 2002, Babuts curated at the Spark Art Center in Syracuse The Trans’cendental Wimmin’s Culture Clash, a group show featuring “experimental performance art by and for women and transgender folk” from the Central New York community.
Description : The project will be divided into two parts. The first part will be the creation of a collection of performances which will comprise an evening length show that Babuts plans to take on tour. The performances combine the physicality of the human medium with spoken text, photographic images, and other various media. The second part consists of unsolicited daytime performances at museums or galleries in which the space will become an instant collaborator. The artist sees these performance in the gallery not as an intrusion but an expression of the freedom and survival of the self, at the same time drawing attention to the privatization and privileging of space itself.
Grupo 609 (Havana, Cuba)
Biography:
Grupo 609 is a five woman collective from Cuba. Their public performances have received much attention in Cuba as they question the repression and misplacement of women’s rights in the Third World. They aim to dislodge the ordinary notions and entrenched social ideals of gender hierarchy and many of their performances are public interventions that draw attention to the social support roles women play but that are more than often taken for granted. Yet Grupo 609 are also known for their humorous parodies which implicate and question various historical and personal feminist problematics, and issues of self-identity and exhibitionism/voyeurism. Their performances have included construction site work in communion dresses, gallery and retail store human-mannequin encampments, straight-from-the-shower street interactions in bathrobes, and a performance of puppets under a bridge for the recent Havana Biennale.
Description:
Grupo 609 plan several New York performances, similar to their public interventions in Cuba.
Stefanie Trojan (Munchen, Germany)
Biography:
Stefanie Trojan began her career as a figurative sculptor and soon turned to performance to inhabit and embody the sculptural space. Trojan feels that by using her person as her material she can elicit a different response from the audience than she could by constructing sculpture in traditional material. By employing her own body as a living sculpture she attempts to free its natural qualities of motion and appearance as well. Trojan’s work navigates the overlapping zone of the personal and public, as theater and “real” life. By interrogating social habits she inserts herself as art into non-art contexts, and documents the performance as well as the public reaction. Trojan’s performances transfer or pass the action onto the viewer or audience, and attempts to engage or energize an open-ended exchange between performer and participant/audience.
She has contributed to, and participated in, group and solo shows in Munich, Mexico City, Venice and New York City. She recently was awarded a DAAD grant for travel and research abroad.
Description:
The work will be a series of solo performances. Some of them will be entirely new, as responses to and created for public or semi-public situation-specific locations. The other sequence will be reprises of previous recent performances done in Europe or Asia, with the distinct intent of registering possible differences of cultural reception.
Tobaron Waxman (Brooklyn, New York)
Biography:
Tobaron Waxman uses voice, video, internet, language and recontextualised objects in his performance installations. His recent work reverently incorporates both Chassidic thought and the lived realities of transsexual embodiment. From these seemingly unrelated lexicons his work indicates variant concepts of gender as applied to notions of the Body, the Land, (ie. Israel) and Israel/Palestine conflict. He has performed in Chicago at Links Hall and Gallery2; in Toronto at Buddies in Bad Times Theatre, The Lab, Cinecycle, and The Music Gallery. He has shown installation in Toronto at the Liason of Independent Filmmakers of Toronto (LIFT), Zsa Zsa, and the OCAD Atrium Gallery; and in San Francisco at The Center and The Lab.
Description:
‘Rememberment’ will be a composite website project which, by the use of virtual space, evokes the process of embodiment as uniquely experienced by the transsexual male (FTM). The site consists of three parts: ‘urethrasite’, a hyperessay about the future of FTM surgeries; ‘letter from the fourth son’, about an FTMs quest for queer mentorship; and the ‘cyberjournals of DovidFTM’, a reflection on the discourse inundation that many FTMs have had to sift through. In addition, health and information resources will be maintained and regularly updated. Each sub-site will utilise audio and video enhancements, and DHTML and javascript programming. The site attempts to further Waxman’s ongoing project to read the text of the body through the code of the internet.
Lois Weaver (New York City) Helen Paris (Middlesex, UK) Leslie Hill (Middlesex, UK)
Biography:
Lois Weaver has been a performer, director, and writer with the Split Britches Company since 1980. She is currently touring with Leslie Hill and Helen Paris in On the Scent, while they are developing a guerrilla video performance entitled Dirty Laundry commissioned by Franklin Furnace in New York. Weaver is also creating a new solo piece entitled Nothing to Write Home About. She teaches at Queen Mary, University of London, where she is involved in STAGING HUMAN RIGHTS, a project that uses performance practice to explore issues of human rights in women’s prisons in Brazil and the UK. Weaver is also editing and directing Peggy Shaw’s To My Chagrin and developing a video performance, What Tommy Needs to Know, in collaboration with Holly Hughes and Eleanor Savage.
Leslie Hill and Helen Paris are London-based artists working in performance, video and digital arts, known for their edgy, humorous interrogations of contemporary culture and politics. Their company ‘curious’ was formed in 1996 and has been supported internationally by institutions such as the Arts Council of England, the National Endowment for the Arts (USA), the National Center for Biological Sciences, India and the Australia Council.
Description:
Dirty Laundry–the Guerrilla Projections. The artists will write and direct short films for projection on laundry at unauthorized locations. Weaver’s piece, Trouble With My Sheets, will be projected on bed linen, airing imagery of sex, ghosts, struggle and comfort. Paris will create Family Hold Back! for projection on a tablecloth, airing issues of etiquette, the madness of manners, repression, and what goes on beneath the perfectly laid table. Hill’s film White Men’s Shirts will be projected on a mast of identical white long sleeve shirts for men and will air issues of eugenics and DNA. Some possible projection sites may include but are not limited to: Union Square, Cooper Union, The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, and Chinatown.
Adrianne Wortzel (New York City)
Biography:
Adrianne Wortzel explores the ramifications of art and cultural perspectives as processed through new technologies. Her investigations, which challenge and expand the functional and interpretive roles of technology, manifest themselves in robotic and telerobotic installations, web works, streaming internet broadcasts, and performance, productions. Wortzel’s telerobotic installation Camoflage Town was exhibited in Data Dynamics at the Whitney Museum of American Art in Spring 2001. Her Globe Theater Repertory Company of Robots was featured in New York as part of Cooper Union’s Technoseduction (1997); in Creative Time’s Art in the Anchorage (1997); and abroad in Ars Electronica 97: FleshFactor (Linz, Austria); and Kunstfluge’s Aerale 99 (Baitz, Germany). Her work is documented at http://artnetweb.com/wortzel
She is Associate Professor of Advertising Design and Graphic Arts at New York City College of Technology, CUNY, and an Adjunct Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, where she is Director of the cooper Union Tele/Robotic Theater.
Description:
Based on the studies of Joseph Weizenbaum’s 1966 computer program ELIZA, Wortzel’s project Eliza Redux, will enable theatrical scenarios in the form of online psychoanalytical sessions available to visitors via an interactive web site featuring real-time interactions between a physical robot responding orally as the psychoanalyst to the visitor/patient’s text-to-speech input. Psychoanalytical “projection” will be interpolated by “patient’s” choice of virtual sets as the robot’s environment during their session. Sessions will be archived and available for public viewing.
Panelists Biographies
Deborah Edmeades
Deborah Edmeades is a practicing artist born in the UK, and but now living in New York City after having spent 17 years in South Africa. Her work often re-enacts childhood ritual and is usually personal. She has been studying acting for the past 7 years as a means to explore emotional reality, especially as it informs the crafting of identity. Her work reflects this quest and is deeply rooted in performance although mediated through various mediums. She has shown work mostly in New York City, at Franklin Furnace, Wow Café, Exit Art, the Mix Festival and the Jack Tilton Gallery among others. She also taught Performance as a Visiting Artist at the University of Texas in Austin.
Zhang Ga
Zhang Ga is an artist, and faculty member at the MFA program of Design and Technology at Parsons School of Design; He also lectures at the Department of Computer Graphics and Interactive Media at Pratt Institute. He has collaborated online works with artists on projects that have been presented internationally, in addition to individual shows held in Germany and the United States. He has organized conferences and forums on the current condition of online art and continues to direct the Netart Initiative – a project initiated at Parson School of Design, to foster vigorous dialogue between the academic and the art world. He also consults various arts organization on new Media art. Zhang Ga studied art at Central School of Fine Art in Beijing China, received a DAAD fellowship while he was studying at the Academy of Arts in Berlin,(HDK) Germany. He holds a MFA degree from Parsons School of Design at New School University. NYC.
Tiffany Ludwig
Tiffany Ludwig is an artist and media consultant. Her work considers the intersection of art, work, and social interaction. Her artwork has been shown around the U.S. and will have its museum debut in 2004 at the Jersey City Museum. Her current project, Trappings, an artwork by the collaborative team Two Girls Working, activates dialogue about power and the creation of identity by asking questions about the clothing women wear to make themselves feel powerful. In 2002 and 2003 she produced Bang On A Can’s streaming E-Festival of the People’s Commissioning Fund Concert. Since 1999 she has managed the website of Franklin Furnace Archive, Inc., launching an entirely new design to coincide with their 25th Anniversary. Ludwig is a contributing writer to Permanence Through Change: The Variable Media Approach, published by the Guggenheim Museum Publications and The Daniel Langlois Foundation for Art, Science, and Technology in 2003.
Ricardo Miranda Zuñiga
Over the last several years Zuñiga has focused his explorations on the effects of globalization. He lives and works in Brooklyn, and has been exhibiting nationally and internationally since 1997. Recent exhibitions include Version 03 at the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art (2003); InteractivA at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Merida, Mexico (2003); AIM Exhibition at the Bronx Museum (2003); Race in Digital Space at the Lucas Complex, University of Southern California (2002); The Kitchen’s Fourth Annual Neighborhood Street Fair, Manhattan, NY (2002). Zuñiga has also been awarded several awards and honors including Future of the Present Artist Fellowship from Franklin Furnace (2003); Artist in Residence at Harvestworks Media Center (2002); Electronic Media and Film Program, New York State Artists Grant Award (2003); Artist in Residence at Kunst Seminar, Metzingen, Germany (1998); Artist in Residence at Poznan Academy of Fine Art, Poland (1997).
William Pope.L
William Pope.L is a member of the Department of Theatre and Rhetoric at Bates College. He attended Mason Gross School at Rutgers University for graduate work and studied with Ruth Maleczec and Lee Breuer of Mabou Mines at Re.Cher.Chez Studio in New York City. He has been part of the Whitney Biennial and is represented by The Project (New York and Los Angeles). He has toured Europe with his crawl piece, The Black Body and Sport, which was performed on the streets, bridges, quays, and malls of Berlin, Prague, Budapest, and Madrid. Pope.L has received many awards, residencies, and grants including three National Endowment Fellowships, a Japan-U.S.A. Friendship Commission Fellowship and a Franklin Furnace Fund for Performance Art Grant. This time Pope.L is crawling the length of Broadway in “Great White Way.”
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Goings On are compiled weekly by Harley Spiller
Click http://www.franklinfurnace.org/goings_on.html
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