ArtBeat: “Sanctorium” @ CAC Woodside, 10/17/09

“Sanctorium” promises to be an adventurous one-night-only exhibition of art, performance and sound at the Contemporary Artists Center at Woodside in Troy from 6-9pm Saturday, October 17. Admission is free.

The evening will feature two works:

“Shortness of Breath and Other Ailments” by Stephanie Loveless:
This collection of works is composed of speakers handmade from paper cones, paper cups and bottles, a de- and re-generating song of longing from a 1937 Walt Disney film, documentation of attempts to speak the languages of wolves, birds, and crickets, and a performance art apothecary. Weaving together different modes of artistic thought explored over the last two years, the exhibit organized around a playful posing of the question, what can “art”, as a perspective, bring to personal and collective “ailments”? From invitations into self-contained aesthetic experiences to whispered instructions for performances to take place outside of the gallery walls, the works are linked in their exploration of intimacy, communication, and art as a space for re-thinking/seeing/hearing and imagining current states of being.

“Subsea” by Mary Cook and C. Ryder Cooley:
Mary Cook will create a life size drawing-installation that envelops the walls of the vestibule of a 18th century stone church. This graphite drawing depicts figures originally taken from film stills from Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s film “The Bitter Tears of Petra van Kant,” in exploration of the film’s connections between desire and power. Concerned with an energetic depiction of human form and its emotive qualities, this meticulously rendered graphite drawing is a representation of the push and pull between the sacred and profane with the emphasis on theatricality and a persistence of raw emotion. Submerged within this sub aqueous landscape of drawings and waves of string and fabric, C. Ryder Cooley will introduce sounds, projections and music within this nautical tableaux, further animating the environment. Viewers will find themselves in a place that can only be defined by their own imagination.