With Performa 11 in full swing through November 21, it seems like the perfect time to introduce you to some of performance art’s most important contemporaries and intriguing up-and-comers, as well as a few of our personal favorites. At the very least, we promise to show you that Marina Abramović isn’t the only performing artist in the world, and it’s not all about shocking antics and bodily fluids. We’re going to mix it up and roundup interdisciplinary art folk, who lean on everything from film to Twitter to perform, giving you ample ways to appreciate their work. Onward!
A provocative photographer and filmmaker, Laurel Nakadate is widely known for her disturbing encounters with older men on film; she taunts while her awkward new friends just stumble around her stupidly. In her latest series of photographs, 365 Days: A Catalogue of Tears, the Yale-trained artist may be feeling some regret, but we doubt it. The tearful series, which is on view in totality at New York’s Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects through June 25, captures Nakadate “taking part in sadness each day.” She weeps on planes and trains, in the bed and on the pot, half-dressed and fully naked. Made in response to the diaristic nature of present-day picture taking, the artist states her photos are inspired, somewhat contrarily, by the “happy self-portraits people make day after day with their cell phone cameras and post on Facebook.”
Filmmaker, photographer, and de facto performer Laurel Nakadate takes on the thorniness of female adolescence and self-image in her funny, wistful, dark, and uncomfortable images.
Already enjoying festival-circuit acclaim for feature films The Wolf Knife and Stay the Same Never Change, Nakadate holds her first museum show in New York next month. The survey spans a decade of deadpan subversion that includes her runaway-chic panty-flags, provocative self-portraits in anonymous men’s homes, precocious teens aping American Apparel softcore, and her newest work, in which she documents her own daily crying jags.
Laurel Nakadate is an American filmmaker, video artist, and photographer based in New York City; she was born in 1975 in Austin, Texas, and spent her childhood in Ames, Iowa. In 2005, Nakadate’s Love Hotel and Other Stories received critical acclaim and Jerry Saltz dubbed her a standout at a P.S.1 group show that same year. She has since been exhibited at the Mary Boone Gallery and the Asia Society in New York, the Howard Yezerski Gallery in Boston, the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, and the Reina Sofia in Madrid. Stay the Same Never Change — a nonlinear yarn about young women set in the heartland — is her first feature film. It plays Rooftop Films Summer Series this Saturday night at 8 p.m. Read More »
