Curated by Max Steele
Featuring works byIsaac Pool and Crystal Palmer
Christopher Udemezue
Friday, February 14 8:00pm | Saturday, February 15 8:00pm
Tickets: $15 General | $8 Low-Income [Buy tickets]
Within the contexts of a fin-de-siecle youth culture, social media, and the 24 hour news cycle, live performance provides a discourse to explore this notion of coping as a personal, corporeal stratagem. Who tells you what you know? How do you know it? Where do you get your information? Who is the news for? How does one navigate, make sense of, react and respond to the demands of overwhelming information?
Engaging with multiple forms, identities, and aesthetics, these performances address such questions, revealing strategies that are personal but not private.
About the Artist
Crystal Palmer and Isaac Pool
Crystal Palmer and Isaac Pool began working collaboratively in 2008. Previous projects include performances with Perfect Weiners and Butts (Samuel Consiglio) at The Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit and co-directing Pool’s recent film “A Alternatives.” In 2013 they established the traveling gallery project Hobby Group with a co-curated exhibition in December at a Jo-Ann Fabric in the suburbs of Detroit. Palmer and Pool recently showed sculptures crafted as props for their play “Salad And I Know It” with What Pipeline at the Paramount Ranch fair in Los Angeles.
Crystal Palmer is an artist working primarily with clay. Currently, she is dipping her foot into the performance pool and so far, the water feels pretty good. Recent group exhibitions include “Reproduction” at What Pipeline, Detroit and “Next Time” at Envoy Enterprises, NYC. Palmer received a BFA from Wayne State University (2013). She lives and works in Detroit.
Isaac Pool is an artist and poet working between New York and Detroit. He holds an MFA in Fine Arts from Parsons The New School for Design (2013) and a BFA in Electronic Arts from Wayne State University (2011). Pool’s practice spans individual studio work, collaborative performance and curatorial projects – most recently with the Next Time and Hobby Group platforms. His work engages with a perverse sense of realism, straddling between fictional narrative and material investment through video, photography, sculpture and text. Recent exhibitions include “A Alternatives” at What Pipeline, Detroit (solo) and “The Intelligence of Things” at The Kitchen, NYC (group). Isaac’s first publication, “Alien She” is now available on Klaus ebooks.
Chris Udemezue
Born 1986 in Long Island, NY, USA Christopher Udemezue is an artist with a background in video and performance art. As a graduate from Parson School of Design (2008), Christopher has shown through out New York including the Envoy Enterprises and The Dumbo Arts Gallery. With work focused of social political issues such as gender politics and ethnicity relations within the constraints and conditions of American Patriarchy and Racism, Christopher employs metaphors that open up dialogue for the viewer. Complex questions like “what it means to be a man” and “what it means to be black” are what he sets out to explore in his performance and video pieces. Self-reflection and introspection are at the forefront of his work as he relates these issues at hand to the context of what it indeed means to be an African – American man using his body as a tool for expression.
About the Curator
Max Steele
I grew up in California and began writing zines and making performance art in the context of punk music when I was a teenager, often performing at houses, outdoor generator-powered shows, and at traditional punk clubs. I went to Sarah Lawrence College, where I studied Fiction and Art History. After moving to New York in 2006, I began self-publishing the experimental fiction zine Scorcher, and began performing material from the zine at spoken-word events. I’ve been in a one-person band since 2003 called The Icebergs, then Max Steele & the Party Ice. I was part of Richert Schnorr’s dance-video band GRAPHIC.GLORY in 2008. I currently play music in the queercore goth duo B0DYH1GH. Since 2005 I’ve made solo performance art work, presenting at venues throughout New York such as Dixon Place, the New Museum, Deitch Projects, BAM, Envoy Enterprises, PPOW Gallery, and the Queens Museum.
