27 Below @ De Fabriek, Eindhoven

27 Below @ De Fabriek, Eindhoven

27 Below is an exhibition of accumulated works and time from 5 artists: Chad Stayrook(US) / Christy Georg(US) / Ian Page(US) / Jess Perlitz(CA) / Jessica Segall(US) who have traveled to De Fabriek to work together for 20 days and 20 nights. The artists have not worked together as a group prior to the residency at De Fabriek, and for most this is their first time in Eindhoven.

What binds them together as a group is a shared past experience of having once voyaged as artist-travelers on a boat to the Arctic Circle. Now, as a group of outsiders once again, they are anchoring at De Fabriek and the expedition will become an exhibition. The selected crew share an approach to making: the creation of fictional worlds, containers, devices, endurance performance and the spirit of adventure.

The space at De Fabriek mimics the tiny little vessel that kept the artists alive on their previous trips to the harsh and remote environment of the Arctic Circle. The space in Eindhoven became a site for the artists to experience, interpret, and mark with collective memory.

Defabriekeindhoven.nl/exhibition/27-below-en-35-jaar-de-fabriek-feest-expo-eten-muziek/

27 Below @ De Fabriek, Eindhoven

All artist worked in the same space, cooked meals together and most of them slept in the same room, except for snoring Chad, but they ended up making individual artworks. Each work was made at de Fabriek in the 20 days they spent there – and each of them in some way ended up making a vehicle with an interactive element.

27 Below @ De Fabriek, Eindhoven

After spending 5 years finishing boat/movie theater in New York, Jessica Segall decided to make the fastest but seaworthy boat she could make in one day and use it explore the city in the spirit of an expedition. She attached the little wooden boat by a hitch to the back of her bicycle for transport.

27 Below @ De Fabriek, Eindhoven

Her destination was the Abbemuseum, which is partially surrounded by the canals creating the feeling of “storming the castle” through the moats. She named the boat the “Gender Bender’, named after the small creek “Gender” in Eindhoven and the bent wood used to construct the boat. The end result was displaying the boat and a 1/2 hour video from the point of view of the boat, starting at a marshy park and ending up at the museum.

27 Below @ De Fabriek, Eindhoven

Segall also made the branch – swing performance, named “Songs for a Lost Bird” inspired by her pet starling who flew away from her studio last summer. She rescued him in 2011 and he grew up and lived in her studio she taught him critical theory. Segall sang love songs for him on the branch trying to lure him back.

27 Below @ De Fabriek, Eindhoven

    Ian Page, 15’x11’x2’ ft

Moving Panorama is inspired by the early movie set backdrop that would produce the effect of movement of through a landscape. Woodblock prints of cactus scroll by and camouflage clothes hang from a clothes line attached between two of the prints. A saddle sitting on a wood frame is a viewing point and a camera angle. In this cartoonish landscape, representations of nature are merely techniques for blending in, for dissolution as the movement of landscape or the subterfuge of disguise. As Roger Caillois writes, “*It is with represented space that the drama becomes specific,since the living creature, the organism, is no longer the origin of the coordinates, but one point among others; it is dispossessed of its privilege and literally no longer knows where to place itself*.”

27 Below @ De Fabriek, Eindhoven

    Chad Stayrook, Testing Site #3, #2, #1, 2015, 20ft x 16ft x 12ft., cardboard, wood, concrete, mdf, model rockets.

A 1:1 cardboard scale model of the Apollo command module “Columbia”, a spaceship designed to travel thousands of miles from earth at astounding speeds, precariously teeters on its side and wedged between the floor and ceiling joists, stuck. Three model rockets launched into hardened concrete and a circular floor cut out resembling the moon surround the ship. The piece uses simple forms and geometry to represent complex feats of engineering and space travel. Testing Site #3, #2, #1 “plays” with the physics of rocketry as a poetic, albeit destructive, gesture. The moment of launch being inverted and frozen in place, forever anchoring bjects of exploration to the ground and gravity.

27 Below @ De Fabriek, Eindhoven

    Jess Perlitz

The sculptures at De Fabriek were abstractions of the manmade landscape. *As Far As One Can See* is a rubble pile made with the bricks of an old house which holds up a flag that stretches out over the gallery to become the sky.

27 Below @ De Fabriek, Eindhoven

    Christy Georg, History Lesson (phonograph machine), 2015.

This direct-drive phonograph machine was built on-site at de Fabriek in Eindhoven, the Netherlands for a brief performance wherein the artist,wearing vintage roller-skates, pushed/skated at the appropriate speed for a 33 rpm vinyl record: ”The Best of the Last 50 Years” was played. The analog instrument has two horns by the artist’s ears to transmit the sound,though the large gallery space made it difficult for viewers to hear and decipher. Several jogged along behind. It was a site-specific one-time-only performance, and now lives as a relic on a very slowly rotating red velvet platform.

27 Below @ De Fabriek, Eindhoven

*Beacon Pulpit* is a communication tower that has a wizard-of-oz moon mask that looms overhead like a fake god or navigational signal. The speech pulpit next to it turns the viewer/audience into something similar.

27 Below @ De Fabriek, Eindhoven

Defabriekeindhoven.nl/exhibition/27-below-en-35-jaar-de-fabriek-feest-expo-eten-muziek/

About Sasha Dees 345 Articles
Verbinder. Wereldburger; Onafhankelijk curator en producent; Focus op Internationaal, Innovatief, Inclusief en Interdisciplinair. Schrijft o.a. voor Trendbeheer, Africanah en ARC Magazine. www.sashadees.com

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