gerard

Description

Multiple channel video installation, dimensions variable The cycle of works known as Reusable Parts/Endless Love is a project that questions how representations of intimacy and narratives of love are produced, re-produced, circulated and exchanged. This three-part project is realized as a performance installation adapted specifically to the exhibition/performance space; a multi-channel video and audio installation (Kiss Solo); and a photographic series (Score in 4 Parts). The project began when Gerard and Kelly encountered Tino Sehgal’s Kiss in an exhibition at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. In Kiss a man and a woman perform a slow, languorous embrace. Struck by the ephemerality of the piece and its consistent boy/girl casting, they returned a number of times to learn its choreography. Under the watchful eyes of museum guards, they spoke the couple’s movements into hidden voice-recorders. This resulted in a twelve-minute audio recording of the artists’ observations of the Kiss dancers’ movements in real time. (“His hands on her lower back…her arms around his shoulders…they turn ooooone huuuundred aaaaaaand eiiiiiiiighty deeeeeegrees.”). Gerard and Kelly use this audio recording as a score for movement in their attempt to reconstruct Kiss with critical differences. The languorous embrace of the couple becomes a series of solo performances, with each dancer enacting both male and female roles on his own body.