5 pairs of sculptures wrought from chrome cantilever chair buildings stand in impermanent positions all through The Kitchen’s sunlit loft. These abstracted chairs maintain horizontal platforms that enable our bodies to recline in particular and sudden methods. The sculptures watch for our bodies to reshape themselves round them, anticipating the potential for use. Prostrate on these unconventional helps, suspended performers likewise await additional motion. Animated by a transgender politics that questions the norms that govern embodied life, “Palms and Knees” extends Gordon Corridor’s investigation into the politics of vulnerability and corporeal assist. Performers exhibit doable engagements with the sculptures in weekly performances that emerge from Corridor’s inquiry into the paradoxical interaction of dependency and liberation in moments of ready.
Corridor’s method to sculpture is formed by their background in dance, emphasizing how we coexist with objects in shared area: “From the beginning, I used to be serious about our our bodies as unbelievable objects that may be skilled and remodeled—not in a degrading approach, however as a approach of respecting the elemental energy of the bodily world, our our bodies included. I make sculpture as a approach of exploring these embodied potentialities.” For that motive, Corridor’s sculptures at all times precede their accompanying choreography, which is generated in response to the sculptures. Finally, Palms and Knees imagines our bodies emancipated from their prescribed makes use of. “A part of what I really like about objects is that they at all times exceed what we would hope for them, even because the maker,” says Corridor. “There’s a politics of taking materiality critically by itself phrases, not as a mere instrument for our targets.”
Stripped of their seats and backs and reshaped into new geometric buildings, the {hardware} of the Breuer-popularized and mass-reproduced chair is each recognizable and summary. The snaking metal varieties as soon as designed for assist now open themselves to new makes use of. Draped over the sculptures, performers carry each other all through the area, in the end reorganizing the item’s positions within the gallery. They relaxation of their new association—static however animated with potential—till they, as soon as once more, encounter different continuously remodeling objects: human our bodies.
Performances will happen within the gallery at variable, unannounced instances throughout common gallery hours on Might 9, 10, 17, 24, and 31. Free, no RSVP required. Performers embody Justin Cabrillos, Margaret Cirino, Samie Konet, Daniel Ricardo Rocha, Arzu Salman, Nikkie Samreth, evan ray suzuki, and Karley Wasaff. Dramaturgy by Lydia Okrent.
Within the northwest nook of the area, Corridor shares textual content and pictures from a latest lecture-performance titled 1–2 pm initially introduced along side Scott Burton: Form Shift at The Pulitzer Arts Basis, St. Louis after which once more as a part of Tom Burr: The Torrington Challenge in Torrington, Connecticut. Utilizing analysis additionally that knowledgeable the physique of labor on view right here, Corridor analyses the often-overlooked expertise of ready—a state the place time turns into palpable by way of inactivity—and the potential of specializing in passive objects of assist. Corridor will reprise the lecture-performance at Wrightwood 659 in Chicago later this yr.
at The Kitchen at Westbeth, New York
till Might 31, 2025
