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Live performances blur line between theater, sculpture

Performance art generates intrigue, mystery from everyday

Four artists performed Saturday in sometimes lavish spectacles that ranged in concept from ideas about gender and sexuality to thoughts about the end of the world.

The performances took place at Hazmat Gallery, 191 E. Toole Ave., on the opening of their new show, "Remnants: Performance Artists and Their Objects." The gallery set up the objects for the performances in installations around the space, and as the evening progressed the artists would perform, using objects as artistic media.

Angela Ellsworth started the evening with her piece, "Money Shots" in which she exercised on an Exer-Glide machine - a machine that imposed the male sexual role upon her body's movement.

The machine was placed on a mirror floor and in front of a mirror wall. She dressed in a sequin dress, wearing a helmet decorated with mirrors like a disco ball.

For an hour, lights reflected spots of moving light off her costume around the dimmed room as she exercised on the machine. A microphone amplified the rhythms of her breathing, and with the aid of artificial saliva, she spat on the mirrored wall and the mirrored floor reflecting her own image.

On a literal level, the piece responded to the social idea of women as glamour objects. The spit and her body movement juxtaposed this idea of the feminine role with the ideas of the masculine role in a patriarchal society.

Ernesto Lopez Borrero's piece, "Mass Extinction" punned off the ritual of Catholic Mass and addressed the idea of everlasting life.

Borrero stood in a mound of clay around his feet, in front of a wall where he had written a cryptic message about the end of the world with clay. Wearing nothing but a reflective silver undergarment, he silently beckoned members of the audience to approach him.

Those selected would place their fingers on an ink pad attached to his undergarment, and mark his chest with their finger prints. Borrero would then pull a piece of clay from around his feet, roll it into a ball and press it into the participants hand.

Before letting the audience member go, he would whisper in their ear, "You will not die. You will live for eternity."

The performance used ritual to challenge notions about spirituality and about what authority grants eternal life.

Ritual, and the obsessive repetition of specific actions was the focus of "The Bribe," Janet Bardwell's piece about art and personal life.

In the piece, Bardwell removed a long cloth, emblematic of a bride's dress, from a table, put an apron on, and prepared several food dishes. She hung nine timers on the wall, each set for different though non-specific times throughout the performance.

Through repetition of the same menial living tasks and through the specially crafted apron and food bags, the work questioned the boundary all artists establish between art and life. As the work progressed, the food seemed to transform into a metaphor for art itself, its ability to nourish and its demands on artists.

The final performance of the evening was Jessica Buege's "Molly's Hunger." Dressed in a business suit, Buege began the performance by dragging a four-foot bag of rocks across the gallery and emptying the bag onto the floor next to a pre-existing pile.

Buege proceeded to perform rituals such as nailing her stockings to a bench and pulling a rubber chord from her zipper and tying the chord between two poles.

The actions, culminating in a tight-rope-like walk across the rocks on the rubber chord, beckoned for meaning and significance but remained open to interpretation.

The power of the performance was in Buege's persistence and determination while executing each task, a persistence that echoes what is required for many of life's meaningless yet necessary acts.

Although Performance Art has predominantly focused on the process and body of the artist during the brief time of action, Hazmat Gallery is working to shift this point of view with this show which will feature the objects used during the performance in their manipulated form.