Performance Paysage, 2020
Performance Footage, Drawings & Score, Text featured on The Kitchen Video Viewing Room
https://onscreen.thekitchen.org/media/beau-bree-rhee
THE BODY is a cosmic and relational site; it is a porous space where we live in radical dependency to the world. I believe that a contemporary, poetic, and emotive art language is needed to make sense of our existence & the state of our Earth today. I approach the body as our main connection to our ecosystem. In my drawings, I work both figuratively and abstractly with these concepts of body-space.
Performance as Landscape (première 3.13.2020 at University of Toronto) stems from a philosophical frustration with the human-centric notion of performance itself. Of course, these desires & questions come from a deeply personal grief at being human now in this particular moment in our planet’s history, in the Anthropocene.
The piece is fundamentally about rage/grief related to climate change and themes of breath and loss/absentia. I wondered if it was possible through this performance to insert (and perhaps even transform) the human into a bigger flow & time of life, into the non-human, the lithic, the telluric. Art is made by and for humans, but it seems necessary to propose an alternative.
Could performance itself become a landscape, an atmosphere, an ecology? What would a paradigm shift into elemental horizontality look like, while ultimately remaining human of course? What about air & atmosphere?