two evenings of performance
@ Mobius 55 Norfolk St
Cambridge, MA
Friday May 18th & Saturday May 19th
7:30pm
Phil Fryer of The Present Tense will be showing new work alongside Jeff Huckleberry, Sandy Huckleberry, Mari Novotny-Jones, Faith Johnson, and Vicky Sabourin
Wall Melody from The Present Tense on Vimeo.
In September 2011, I was invited to be part of an exhibition titled Time Body Space Objects, curated by Alice Vogler. For this exhibition, each artist was allotted an hour of performance time, on the theme of ‘commitment’. I wanted to create something that challenged me to commit to an action for the full hour allotted to me. I had been thinking a lot about John Cage at the time, and about his experience in the anechoic chamber at Harvard. Expecting to experience the ultimate silence, Cage was confronted by the sound of his own blood flowing in his body, and thus the impossibility of silence. I wanted to make a commitment to the omnipresence of sound, by way of introducing a single tone, generated by a keyboard. For one full hour, I stood in a corner and held one note. The chosen note mimics the drone of our blood flow, and gives us the opportunity to meditate on our own audio output. The commitment of this performance is its stillness. Like Cage’s anechoic chamber, this stillness provides an access point for the nuances of the sound, which present themselves over the course of the hour.
Philip Fryer is a performance, sound and video artist living and working in Boston, Massachusetts. His work is a meditation on mortality, chaos/order, and the body as a circuit. His recent exploration has been focused on using lo-fi technologies such as circuit bending and cassette tape loops, both as individual pieces and as elements of performances and videos.
photos by Sandrine Schaefer
For multi-media artist, Sue Murad, stillness is a way to experience rest, both in life and in art. Murad describes her work as an intuitive engagement with form, disregarding notions of usefulness, common meaning, and prescribed narratives. Much of Murad’s work operates in the territories of slippage between experimental dance, performance art, and visual art. Having the opportunity to experience her work live, Murad accesses a mindfulness with every micro-movement of her body. After reviewing her work for the Stillness Series, it was clear that Murad has successfully applied the same intention that she employs corporally to her utilization of objects.
"OJ Disk" 1998, Frozen orange juice, melting, installed at Massachusetts College of Art & Design 1998
Murad elaborates further on the concept of stillness:
“It ushers in quietness, regardless of the environment. Stillness has magnified moments of both peace and isolation. It has punctuated a work’s rhythm, and noted the finality of death. It has emphasized an inner human world and, in my installation work, has been interrupted by time and gravity.”
"The Tape Room" 2007, time based installation, as adhesive releases, tape unrolls at varying intervals and speeds over the duration of 9 days, installed at Arthouse, Boston
Through this series, The Present Tense has observed that stillness is a concept that evokes viscerally physical responses. Is this possible to achieve a similar reaction when applying this concept to an inaminate object? After looking at documentation from Murad’s installations “The Tape Room” and “OJ Disk,” I believe it is. Murad approaches these objects with a sensitivity that seems reserved for the human body. The tape is subject to the effects of gravity while the Disk of orange juice sweats from the heat. Through her experimentation, Murad turns the common objects, tape and orange juice into living beings.
Sue Murad is a multi-media artist working in visual and performing art. She teaches at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and runs Orange, an art, design & video studio. After 4 years with the performance art band, U.V. Protection (2004-2007,) Sue was a recipient of a 2008 Massachusetts Cultural Council award in Choreography. Starting in 2012, Murad will be an Artist in Residence at Children’s Hospital Boston. She lives and works in Boston.
Sitting With Cloud Gate
October 21st, 2009, 7am- 5pm
Chicago, Millennium Park
On October 21st, 2009, Boston-based artist, Daniel S. DeLuca sat in front of Cloud Gate by Anish Kapoor in Millennium Park in Chicago from the hours of 7 am-5pm. This was part of a series of actions in response to public art that DeLuca was working on at the time. Concentrating on the action of deep breathing, with eyes half closed, the artist observed his thoughts and bodily sensations. DeLuca considers this a process of stillness. This is a process that involves only the essential movements. He states “Physically, we will never be still, although we may perceive moments of slow and subtle movement, the world underneath us is moving, and the world is in yet another movement orbiting the sun, and so on and so forth. Striving for the physical concept of stillness is a way to access acuity of sensation, observation, and experience. This acuity is important for most of my work; it focuses me on my actions and environment.”
“Most people who visited the sculpture would behave in similar fashions; they would be seduced by the brilliant reflective quality of the sculpture and proceed to take pictures of themselves in it. 
Most interactions only lasted a few minutes before viewers left. I interpreted the sculpture quite literally. For me it indicated both inward and outward reflection: reflection on the individual, and reflection on the whole (city). I wanted to encourage the idea of spending more time with Cloud Gate and to do what I felt like it was asking its audience to do. I spent a full working day, sitting with my eyes half open, reflecting on and observing, my mind, sensorial systems, and the context of cities like Chicago.” – Daniel S. DeLuca
Daniel S. DeLuca is a Boston based artist, and current Mobius member, who uses formal techniques from performance/conceptual art to realize his work. His projects explore structures and concepts related to politics and globalization, art, and psycho-geography. His work has been shown nationally and internationally in the context of private and public spaces, galleries, and performance art festivals. Daniel is currently developing artistic research projects that investigate semiotics and the creation of new language, and large-scale reoccurring events around the world.
all photos by Celia Marks
Terror of History 2009 is not a piece that The Present Tense would normally show. It isn’t performance art, it is a song and video created by Kid Romance on the subject of time passing and historical memory loss. The video is a compilation of still images that are glimpses of a time that have long passed in Kid Romance’s life. Romance states that the images by themselves are not important. “It is what is between the images that is meant to protrude. Everything that is not there that makes up a life. The undocumented history that is obliterated and the documented history that becomes something new in each new present is the subject of this piece.”
The purpose of this website is to create a resource for contemporary live art practices. We attempt to document art that is essentially impossible to capture though documentation. Kid Romance’s approach to understanding documented and undocumented histories spoke to us. Romance’s answer is stillness, providing a moment amongst the visual and audio chaos to consider what is unseen.
Kid Romance aka Lucy Watson is an artist based in Allston MA. Lucy attended high school at the North Carolina School of the Arts in Winston Salem. She has a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Tufts University in partnership with SMFA, Boston. She is involved currently with a vibrant DIY community that exists in Allston and has ties to international music communities. Lucy is working on her first feature film.
William Skaleski’s practice centers on the idea of being alone. An aspect of loneliness that fascinates Skaleski, is the human instinct to seek comfort and feelings of safety in places or objects. Skaleski creates performances that bring situations of loneliness into a public setting. Skaleski also uses movement as a way to externally convey internal emotions.
In his piece Anticipation, 2011 Skaleski presents an intimate struggle of getting from one side to another. The piece includes live action and a video projection that allows this action to be viewed from multiple perspectives. This composition challenges witnesses to consider whether or not the artist is succeeding or failing in his task, or are both perspectives equal to eachother?
There are few moments of physical stillness during Anticipation. However, the piece requires a level of patience that can be equated with stillness. Although Skaleski’s intent is to seek comfort, this piece can be uncomfortable to watch. The artist is engaging in an action that seems simple, getting from one point to another. His process of doing this is anything but simple. Skaleski’s gestures are so physically vulnerable that there are moments he transforms into a child engaged in an act of learning how to move his body. This exercise in embodiment presented with the inverted projection of the act, brings to mind a quote from Stan Brakhage:
“How many colors are there in a field of grass to the crawling baby unaware of ‘Green’? How many rainbows can light create for the untutored eye? How aware of variations in heat waves can that eye be? Imagine a world alive with incomprehensible objects and shimmering with an endless variety of movement and innumerable gradations of color. Imagine a world before the ‘beginning was the word.”
Anticipation, on a basic level seems to be an attempt to unlearn what is known to unlock possibilities for new understandings of the complexities of the human psyche.
William Skaleski is a working artist in Brookfield, Wisconsin. He has earned a BFA in Art & Design concentrating in Digital Studio Practice in the Peck School of the Arts at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. His practice centers on being alone, being able to perform concerning both positive and negative aspects. Both the concepts of performing and being alone is a fascinating combination to him; bringing the situations of loneliness in a public setting can always make for an interesting experience to bring the two opposites together. He has exhibited around the Milwaukee area as well in New York.
On Monday, Feb. 27th 2012, the performance art community lost one of it’s most important members, Bob Raymond. Bob was a staple in the Boston Performance Art community for over 30 years. He was a long time member of the Mobius Artist Group. In addition to being an intermedia artist, Bob was committed to documenting and archiving the work of countless artists from Mobius and beyond. His expertise and sensitivity to time-based media was always apparent in his photographs and in the way he would document performance pieces. Often times, cameras can distract and feel obtrusive during a performance piece. Bob was always mindful of this. He approached documenting performance art with the utmost respect. (he even bought a camera with the quietest shutter speed, so as not to interrupt pieces!) It was considered an honor to have Bob Raymond document your work.
In addition, Bob was a phenomenal person. He was kind, generous, funny, and a good friend. Being one of our biggest supporters from the very beginning, he had an enormous impact on The Present Tense. He always attended our events, photographed for us, and shared his wisdom. We are grateful to have had the opportunity to know and learn from him. His presence and contribution to the movement will be missed enormously.
The Present Tense
