Material Actions
performance
Walters Art Museum and School 33 Art Center
30:00
2016

Material Actions is an audiovisual performance created with video artist Mark Brown. This piece was developed specifically for the Dutch Cabinet at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, MD and premiered as part of their summer 2016 ART/SOUND/NOW series. In this work I use a series of contact microphones to “play” common, modern materials such as bricks, coins, and a fan. Brown projects a sound-reactive video behind me.

This performance considers the economics of the Dutch Golden Age and its impact on modern-day global capitalism. Each object used is deliberate. The fan implies overseas trade, the feather symbolizes colonialism, the coins and bills denote the accumulation of capital, and the bricks allude to metropolitan expansion. Continuing the theme of global commerce, Brown synthesizes video imagery of waves and storms that he frames within the scalloped edge of a Dutch porcelain plate.

This work was subsequently re-performed at School 33 Art Center in Baltimore, MD in the fall of 2016.