Carcass (Curation)

Carcass was one of three exhibits curated for the Seaworthy curation series.

A plop art curation of site specific work from past Lo-Fi Arts Festivals

Seven years ago members of Canoe Social Club banded together to create the Lo-Fi Arts Festival, an annual 24-hour exploration of installation art, performance, and collaboration at the 360 acre Smoke Farm in the Stillaguamish River Valley. SEAWORTHY’s inaugural exhibition, Carcass examines the remnants and disparate fragments of these past projects. Installed in direct opposition to their original context and the artists’ intent, this plop art curation asks the viewer to reflect on what remains after temporary works fade into the past. Can the experiences, objects, and participants continue to influence and interact with one another when removed from their initial environments?

Designed to invert the Lo-Fi experience, Carcass is both exhibition and documentation. Pipes from the once massive Potentially Annoying Sound (PAS) rest silent, detached from companion components and instead nestled among fellow artists works. Its brash sounds, now dissected from the device, emanate from a divorced speaker. Laura Becker’s pink inner tube island, Flotunda, hangs deflated on the gallery walls, a shell of the socialization platform it had been in 2011. Alan Sutherland’s re-enacted Butoh performance, HAGIOSCOPE, is a new, distilled iteration of its previous state, stripped of both it’s clay and second performer.

Each work has an individual history yet their condensed placement highlights surprising visual synchronizations between the diverse works, many unnoticed when the pieces were spread out in an expansive landscape. Are these disembodied objects just remains, or do they have a collective spirit? While the life of each of these objects and performances was initially tied to a specific landscape, can they create a self-contained afterlife in this new space? Carcass stands as elegy to temporal events that have passed, but also as an unexpected reinvention—an emergence of soul amongst the discards.

Participating Artists: Aaron Haba, Adria Garcia, Angus Maxwell, Anne Blackburn, boom! theatre company, Chris McMullen, Daryle Conners, DK Pan, Elizabeth Rose, Erin Shafkind, Jason Puccinelli, John Boyland, Jordan Schwartz, Kathleen Skeels, Keely Meehan, Laura Becker, Nicole Kistler, NKO, Pol Rosenthal, Robb Kunz, Sarah DeWeerdt, Sarah Kavage, Scott Schuldt, Sierra Nelson, soikowski research, Steve Leroux, Steve Withycombe, Stewart McCullough, Tessa Hulls, Timothy Firth.



Press:
The Stranger Suggests: ‘Carcass’, The Stranger, August 2013