It’s hard to believe, given the endless summer, that it’s almost time to pull your head out of that can of Ranier you’re floating down a river with and put your Art Pants on. But lo, TBA:14 kicks off on Thursday!
If you’ve yet to peruse this year’s offerings, you’re late! Luckily we’ll have our own guide to the festival on the streets by Wednesday. (Also see the new Agenda arts guide for our capsule descriptions.) In the meanwhile, there are two other ways for you to get your TBA pre-game on starting now:
Miranda July’s Somebody app: The deal is you download this free app from iTunes, create an account, and then you are able to send and receive messages between other users. Except, when you send someone a message, it won’t go directly to them. It will go to the Somebody user closest to them. They’ll get an alert and be able to see the message, including the intended recipient’s photo (so they can find them, because presumably this will be a stranger). Then the idea is they go over and deliver the message, to which the sender can add instructions like “crying” or “hug.” As you can imagine, this only really works when there is a critical mass of users in the same general area or “hotspot.” So ta-da, PICA and TBA are hotspots. While you’re waiting, you can go ahead and download it to get started and practice. It would be helpful if some of you would do that, in fact, so I could test mine out. I already asked my husband and he said no before I could finish explaining it. 🙁
The project, by the way, launched at the Venice Film Festival along with a short demo film that’s part of the (fancy, awesome) clothing brand Miu Miu’s Women’s Tales Series:
Guess which part of that film I thought was the most awkward.
Wynne Greenwood’s Stacy: You remember the queer feminist artist from Tracy and the Plastics—those live performance days may have passed but at Reed’s Cooley Gallery you can revisit the project along with some of Greenwood’s more recent work:
Greenwood transforms the Cooley Gallery into a studio and performance space in order to re-engage her groundbreaking art band—Tracy + the Plastics—in relationship to her most recent experimental video, installation, and object-based works. Tracy + the Plastics presents an expansive vision of public and private identity in which Greenwood performs live with two projected personae: Nikki (on keyboards) and Cola (on drums). The three women sing, banter, and chat—unfolding their relationship across seductively electric gaps of meaning and communication. In Greenwood’s words: “When an individual in a marginalized group talks to a recorded image of themselves it empowers the individual to open the door to the understanding and celebration that she/he/it can be deliberate.” Similarly, Greenwood’s most recent installations incorporate video and object-based works to create spaces of subjective encounter and healing. Stacy continues these currents in unexpected, new forms.
The opening reception for this show isn’t until Friday, but it’s been up since Sept 2. Pack a picnic while you’re at it; sunny days on the lawn in front of the Ivy League-lookin’ old dorms are pretty boss.
- via PICA/TBA