Friday, February 26
7:00-9:30pm CT
Streaming on Twitch
FREE, $5 suggested donation (100% goes to the artists)
In moving their public performance program online Out of Site has been facilitating international collaborations with their alumni community of performance artists and dancers. In the February edition OoS is excited to present a new collaboration between Rachel Bunting (Chicago) and Sheila Toledo (Switzerland). In facilitating connections between their artists and prioritizing time in their bi-weekly meetings for conversations about performance practice has been a generative creative process for the Out of Site community of artist.
Performance Line-Up:
7:00pm CT - Rachel Bunting & Sheila Toledo
7:35pm - Meghan Moe Beitiks
8:00pm - Erin Peisert
8:35pm - Duff Norris
9:05pm - Sara Zalek
Rachel Bunting started making dance and performance as “The Humans” in 2002. Her work, which has been described as magic realism, is episodic and image-based, using mask, object, video and voice. She has always used writing as a tool to develop her performance work and has recently given it more time and energy. In 2019, she was published in Skidrow Penthouse, a NYC magazine, and also got her first chapbook, Unthawed Hearts of the Birds of Last Year published by Dancing Girl Press, in Chicago. Rachel has received many grants and awards as a dance maker, yet is, and has always been reticent to limit herself to just one genre. She looks forward to a continued, curious artistic (r)evolution where dances get to masquerade as films, visual art can whisper in ears, and poetry marches down the street.
Sheila Toledo is constantly searching for the condition of freedom that the human being was born with. Through mirror glass she reflects her own never-ending stream of questions. The possibilities that these questions and reflections are a dialectical confrontation between the vision of the world and one’s own internal construction. To investigate the incessant duality that makes us human.
Meghan Moe Beitiks is an artist working with associations and disassociations of culture/nature/structure. She analyzes perceptions of ecology though the lenses of site, history, emotions, and her own body in order to produce work that analyzes relationships with the non-human. She was a Fulbright Student Fellow, a recipient of the Claire Rosen and Samuel Edes Foundation Prize for Emerging Artists, a MacDowell Colony fellow, and an Artist-in-Residence at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts. She exhibited her work at the I-Park Environmental Art Biennale, Grace Exhibition Space in Brooklyn, Defibrillator Performance Art Gallery in Chicago, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the House of Artists in Moscow, and other locations in California, Chicago, Australia and the UK. She received her BA in Theater Arts from the University of California, Santa Cruz and her MFA in Performance Art from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is currently an interdisciplinary Studio Art Lecturer at the University of Florida. www.meghanmoebeitiks.com
Erin Peisert's performative practice examines social behavior as it relates to nationality, power, and cultural conventions. She aims to provoke states of heightened sensory awareness and to elicit a sense of collective biography by publicly engaging elements of chance in her site-responsive and often interactive approach.
Duff Norris is a performance artist working with notions of audienceship and interstitial spaces of engagement. Starting from Marshall McLuhan’s saying, “the medium is the message”, Duff bends the parameters of digital spaces we’ve recently flooded to and revives techniques of video looping to create a new kind of engagement.
Sara Zalek is an interdisciplinary artist and convenor of action based performance, rooted in physical investigations of trauma, resilience, and transformation. Their work is intimate and raw, poetic and participatory in nature. They promote the intentional act of disruption to create social and ecological change. www.saratonin.com
Butoh Curious / Butoh Chicago: www.butohchicago.com
Curator: Carron Little is the creative producer of Out of Site Chicago (OoS). OoS is dedicated to working in public space and providing support to our ever growing artist community, in production on Chicago sidewalks and plazas since 2011. Carron is committed to public performance that facilitates a dialogue directly with the publics. She performs as queen of luxuria fusing poetry and performance with a visual arts practice. outofsitechicago.org/