Tying the Knot
Directed by Rah Gerg and performed by Phenon Grace Murphy and Annie Peterson
Presented in An Endless Meeting: 變 SLOW BURN curated by Chinese Artists and Organizers (CAO) Collective 离离草
Friday Novemeber 6th, 7:00pm FREE
Presented as part of An Endless Meeting: Collective Process, Artistic Labor, and the Politics of Working Together
“Tying the Knot” embodies the entanglement inherent to attachment. This sculptural activation conveys the uneasy and profound process of becoming enmeshed with another: to change and be changed by them. Two dancers in orbit exchange proximity, gravity, tension, and slack. The sculptural installation Betrothed enacts its will on the dancers, who move as extensions of the work.
Betrothed is a beckoning, ever-shifting system of relationships. Its modular body is made up of papermache, plaster, wire, printed scans of jewelry and grasses, wooden panel, stretched canvas, sewn fabric and paper collage, mulberry fiber, indigo dyed rope, twine, crochet with dyed yarn, and found objects. As components are rearranged, they are constantly subjected to new encounters and ecologies. This process of forming images and meaning only to be ripped apart exudes queer malleability. It plays with tension and slack, activation and rest, fear and desire, proximity, and negotiation of relationship boundaries. This restless entity undergoes seasonal shifts and incorporates found and gifted materials, grounded by adaptation, arrangement, and collective impact.
“Tying the Knot” is directed, costumed, and fabricated by Rah Gerg and performed by Phenon Grace Murphy and Annie Peterson. These three are multidisciplinary artist members of hall pass project space, located just down the hall from Vox Populi.
About the Artists
Rah Gerg is a mixed-media painter using papermaking, textiles, collage, assemblage, and costume-making to transmute their reality. Bound by temporality and place, their practice emphasizes site specificity, collaboration, and immersive encounters which incorporate found and gifted materials.
Annie Peterson is a movement + video artist and producer who is obsessed with the tension of performance, showing the play in concentration, and the often awkward sublime.
Phenon Grave Murphy is a performing artist and musician based in Philly, interested in creating sonic worlds, resonances, synthesis, connectivity, and water.
About 變 SLOW BURN
In 變 SLOW BURN, eight artists and collectives explore memory, belonging, grief, queer kinship, dreaming, and transformation. This exhibition brings together installation, performance, video, sound, and painting. Breathing from the mystical creature of fènghuáng – bigender birds that guard the South and Fire – this exhibition centers the slow burning of grief, rage, resistance, and world building. Etymologically, 變 biàn denotes weaving through silk and words with folding hands. Shifting between meanings of movement, chaos, uprising, and change, 變 gathers collective practice into a relational cosmology shaped by tending, where rebirth unfolds not through spectacular sacrifice, but through the act of coming together again and again.
Co-curated laura 嘟嘟 and huiyin zhou 徽音, curators in residence at Vox Populi, as part of An Endless Meeting.
About An Endless Meeting
An Endless Meeting: Collective Process, Artistic Labor, and the Politics of Working Together is a multi-pronged project taking place this fall at Vox Populi that activates collective process as subject, form, and method. Spanning exhibitions, a curatorial residency, public programs, and a print publication, the project explores the politics of collectivity, inviting broad publics to reflect on their own experiences of collaboration. An Endless Meeting will be presented as part of Collective Futures, a citywide initiative bringing together artist-run and community-based organizations to examine collective cultural production.
An Endless Meeting: Collective Process, Artistic Labor, and the Politics of Working Together has been supported by The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage.
About The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage
The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage is a multidisciplinary grantmaker and hub for knowledge-sharing, funded by The Pew Charitable Trusts, and dedicated to fostering a vibrant cultural community in Greater Philadelphia. The Center invests in ambitious, imaginative, and catalytic work that showcases the region’s cultural vitality and enhances public life, and engages in an exchange of ideas concerning artistic and interpretive practice with a broad network of cultural practitioners and leaders.