Hannah and Amy Buckley
Daniel Konhauser and Maxine Moerman
Double Zero
Through July 20 - You Must Change Your Life at Krowswork. This is not a traditional exhibition as such but rather a series of performances and actions spread out across three weekends here in July. I was able to make it to last Sunday afternoon's installment, "Double Bodies", which offered many moments of spine-tingling inspiration perfectly in line with the Rilke poem whose last line gives the series its title. Artist duo Hannah Ireland and Annie Vought of Double Zero had set up a project in one room of the gallery called A Letter a Year Later that encouraged two friends to sit across from one another at a table and write each other a missive, to be held by Ireland and Vought until a year has passed and then mailed to the respective recipients. I loved the time capsule aspect of their piece as well as the way it made me think about how some human connections are so strong and others so fragile. The theme of pairings continued in an installation by twin sisters Amy and Hannah Buckley consisting of the matching dresses they wore as little girls, and then the sisters themselves danced together in a performance that was enabled by Skype. Amy was with us in Oakland while Hannah was several time zones away in England, her image superimposed onto the wall behind Amy. The stutters and stops of the Skype video feed lent an immediacy to the performance as the women appeared to overlap and intertwine through their virtual connection. Finally we watched dancer Laura Marsh face her own video double in Daniel Konhauser and Maxine Moerman's piece Spoonfed, in which Marsh at first matched the movements of a projected version of herself before the doppelgangers veered off into different directions entirely. The Krowswork series wraps up tomorrow night with a different set of artists, and there is a healthy heaping of poetry, theater, and painting as performance on the agenda. If you want to see why Oakland is one of the most exciting places to be in the world right now I recommend heading on over.
See also:
- Krowswork
- Double Zero
- negotiation of space (Hannah and Amy Buckley)
- Daniel Konhauser
- Maxine Moerman