SANCTORIUM: Saturday, Oct 17, 6-9pm

A night of visual art, performance and sound featuring work by Stephanie Loveless, Mary Cook, and C.Ryder Cooley.

SHORTNESS OF BREATH AND OTHER AILMENTS
by STEPHANIE LOVELESS 

This work is composed of speakers handmade from paper cones, paper cups and bottles, a de- and re-generating song of longing from a 1937 Walt Disney film, documentation of attempts to speak the languages of wolves, birds, and crickets, and a performance art apothecary.  Weaving together different modes of artistic thought explored over the last two years, the exhibit organized around a playful posing of the question, what can "art", as a perspective, bring to personal and collective "ailments"? From invitations into self- contained aesthetic experiences to whispered instructions for performances to take place outside of the gallery walls, the works are linked in their exploration of intimacy, communication, and art as a space for re-thinking/seeing/hearing and imagining current states of being.


SUBSEA is a collaboration between MARY COOK & C. RYDER COOLEY

Mary Cook will create a life size drawing-installation, that envelops the walls of the vestibule of a 18th century stone church. This graphite drawing depicts figures originally taken from film stills from Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s film The Bitter Tears of Petra van Kant, in exploration of the film’s connections between desire and power. Concerned with an energetic depiction of human form and its emotive qualities, this meticulously rendered graphite drawing is a representation of the push and pull between the sacred and profane with the emphasis on theatricality and a persistence of raw emotion.  Side by side with the drawing and submerged within a sub aqueous landscape of ocean waves made of string and fabric, performance artist C. Ryder Cooley will float from the rafters within this nautical tableaux, introducing sounds and projections that will further animate the environment. The viewer will find themselves in a place that can only be defined by their own imagination.

More about the artists:

STEPHANIE LOVELESS is a Montreal-born, Brooklyn-based artist currently working with sound, video, voice and other humans. 

MARY COOK is a Brooklyn-based artist who works primarily with drawing. She takes an interdisciplinary approach by integrating sculpture and sound into her work. Exploring the drawn figure with hand-crafted abstractions and string, she creates installations that are inspired by the experience of cinema. 

C. RYDER COOLEY is an interdisciplinary artist, musician and performer. Weaving together chimeric images with found props and forgotten objects, she creates cinematic performances and installation spaces.