The Kitchen announces first session of The Kitchen L.A.B.,A new inter-disciplinary discussion series,Wednesday, September 19Featuring Shannon Jackson, Elad Lassry, Tere O’Connor and Lynne Tillman
New York, NY, September 17, 2012—On Wednesday, September 19, The Kitchen inauguratesThe Kitchen L.A.B., a new program devoted to presenting, discussing, and developinginterdisciplinary works revolving around themes of common interest to artists in different fields—and, more specifically, considering the meaning and uses of specific words in contemporary art.This season’s theme, presence, will be discussed by four of the most prominent voices in the artstoday: Shannon Jackson, Elad Lassry, Tere O’Connor and Lynne Tillman.
Moderated by The Kitchen’s executive director and chief curator Tim Griffin, the event will startat 7:00 P.M. at The Kitchen (512 West 19th Street). Admission is free and open to the public.Seating is first-come, first-served.
Throughout its 40-year history, The Kitchen has been committed to a spirit of innovation acrossdisciplines and, in this regard, hosts an incredibly diverse audience. And yet this audience today isalso surprisingly atomized.
To wit, art communities see art, dance communities see dance, music communities see music, and so on. Such disjuncture pervades the contemporary cultural field even while there is an increasinginterest among artists in interdisciplinarity. Thus, the same words often carry very differentmeanings for artists in different fields, and the same maneuvers signify in different ways.
The Kitchen L.A.B. invites artists to unpack such vocabularies by responding to them both inconversation and artworks, creating hybrid events that will underline not only points ofcommonality among disciplines but also, as important, real differences.
The series begins against the backdrop of Elad Lassry’s Untitled (Presence), for which hecollaborates with dancers from the New York City Ballet and American Ballet Theater in TheKitchen theater space, aiming to consider changing relationships between performance,photographic reproduction, and perception.
Elad Lassry’s work was recently featured in ILLUMInations, at the International Pavilion at the54th Venice Biennale, and in a solo exhibition at Kunstnernes Hus, Oslo, Norway. He will have asolo exhibition at Fondazione Galleria Civica, Trento, Italy, this year as well. His solo exhibitionshave also been held at The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Kunsthalle Zurich,Switzerland; the Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis; and Tramway, Glasgow, Scotland.
Recent group exhibitions include The Anxiety of Photography, Aspen Art Museum; SecretSocieties. To Know, To Dare, To Will, To Keep Silence, Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt and CAPCde Bordeaux; Time Again, SculptureCenter, New York; Les Rencontres d'Arles 2010 / Edition 41,Arles, France; and New Photography 2010, Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Shannon Jackson is the director of the Arts Research Center at University of California atBerkeley where she is also Richard and Rhoda Goldman Professor of Rhetoric and of Theater,Dance and Performance Studies. Previous publications include Professing Performance (2004),Lines of Activity (2000) and Social Works: Performing Art, Supporting Publics (2011).
Tere O’Connor has been choreographing since 1982 and has created over 35 works for hiscompany. The company has performed all over the world, for such distinguished organizations asthe Lyon Opera Ballet, White Oak Dance Project, de Rotterdamse Dansgroep, Dance Alloy, andZenon. O’Connor is a 2009 United States Artist Rockefeller Fellow, recipient of a Foundation forContemporary Performance Art Award, Arts International’s DNA Project Award, and a CreativeCapital Award, and past Guggenheim Fellow.
Lynne Tillman is the author of five novels, four collections of short stories, one collection ofessays and two other nonfiction books. She collaborates often with artists and writes regularly onculture. Her novels include American Genius, A Comedy (2006) and No Lease on Life (1998)which was a New York Times Notable Book of 1998 and a finalist for the National Book CriticsCircle Award, She is the Fiction Editor at Fence Magazine, Professor and Writer-in-Residence inthe Department of English at the University at Albany, and recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship.
