posted 08 Jul 2020
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Collision (1916)
- Fri, 22 Jan 2016
- 7.00 PM - 8.00 PM
- Tickets: Free, booking required.
Painter, printmaker and editor, Melissa Gordon is interested in addressing the exhibition as a ‘theatre in the round’: highlighting shifting perspectives when staging her work. At 7pm, 22nd January 2016 she launches a week long exhibition in Bluecoat's Performance Space with the first ever staging of Mina Loy's 1916 play 'Collision'. It is Loy's experimental script that determines the hang of Gordon's canvases, installed in front of a live audience by mime artist Rita Pulga. Pulga uses panels of fabric, hanging frames, and pulley systems to enact a live transformation of the Fallible Space installation which will then remain as an exhibition until Sunday 31st January.
This is the first ever staging of Collision by Mina Loy, on the centenary after it was written. Music by Chris Evans and Morten Norbye Halvorsen.
Melissa Gordon (1981) is an American artist based in London. She was the winner of the ABN AMRO Kunstprijs 2007 and the Royal Prize for Painting in the Netherlands in 2005, and studied at Rhode Island School of Design, Cooper Union in New York and De Ateliers in Amsterdam.
Recent exhibitions include Material Evidence, Spike Island, Bristol (2013), Structures for Viewing at Marianne Boesky Gallery, NY (2012), Martin Gropius Bau, Berlin (2012), Art in the Parking Space at LAX Art, Los Angeles (2012) and Future Forward at The Temporary Stedelijk, Amsterdam (2011). Gordon co-edits LABOUR, a new independent publication on art and work with a feminist perspective with Marina Vishmidt. She is represented by Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York, Galerie Juliette Jongma, Amsterdam, Cosar HMT, Dusseldorf.
Rita Pulga was born in Modena, Italy in 1984. She studied at International School of Corporeal Mime l'Ange Fou, London from 2007 till 2011, which continues the tradition of corporeal mime developed by Etienne Decroux. Street theatre and cabaret performer Rita has produced "Top Hats and High Heels" a cabaret night created by her own company "Flying Flees productions". She has also worked with Gordon in 2011 at Autoitalia, London (The Transparency of Objects, with Jessica Wiesner).
Collision started as a part of a wider exhibition of Gordon's work at Spike Island in 2013:http://www.spikeisland.org.uk/events/exhibitions/melissa-gordon-material-evidence/
Melissa Gordon Material Evidence (2013) installation view Spike Island. Photograph by Stuart Whipps