Liebe und Tod *
Richard Strauss' Salome features one of the most famous and fascinating femmes fatales of the 19th century. The opera focuses on love and death, and features intoxicating, ecstatic music that broke with everything previously known. Artist Jocelyn Foye draws from its authority to explore themes of duality, aggression, awe, and voyeurism in her piece entitled DANCE, OPERA, DRAW.

Foye's performance and resulting exhibition examine the intersection of opera, dance, and art; creating a conversation between the genres. On a small white plinth in the center of an art studio, soprano Sonia Kazarova robustly resounds excerpts from the final scene of Salome – a vocally demanding piece that requires volume, stamina, and power. During this dramatic adaptation, while Kazarova proclaims Salome's simultaneous love and hatred to the severed head of John the Baptist, two flanking dancers, Mecca Andrews and Lora Ivanova, physically interpret this duality through spatial dramatics, using their bodies as the tools to apply charcoal to canvas. Kasarova resonates each evocative stanza as a dancer responds accordingly, shifting between fluid and aggressive movements – in turn creating a conversation that is detached yet fervent. The resulting images, drawings created by the imprints of the dancer's hands, bodies, and feet, are mounted and displayed for the duration of the exhibition along with audio documentation of the event.

Jocelyn Foye's work is defined by an interest in capturing and illustrating how the reoccurrence of actions – derived from labor or physical motion – produce fundamental visual patterns. Many of her performances, in which she acts as producer rather than participant, have combined a sport or action not usually seen in a gallery that result in a static work – a material record of the event, often cast in clay or sand. Her private and public performances are often heavy with spectacle and aggressive movement, and the resulting objects carry the aura of the performance, but function as complete artworks. Unlike many performance artists who view the spectacle along with the resulting detritus as the work itself, Foye places significance on the end product standing on its own as a seductive object.

Sinead Finnerty-Pyne, curator

*love and death

 

DANCE, OPERA, DRAW
February 12 – May 12, 2012
Reception: Feb. 11, 7-9pm, performance at 830pm

Curator: Sinéad Finnerty-Pyne
Performance: Saturday, February 11 8:30 p.m.
Location: Armory Center for the Arts, 145 N. Raymond Ave., Pasadena, CA 91103