thingamajigs performance group

Thingamajigs Performance Group convenes to contemplate group member Keith Evans‘s participation in the exhibition Loss and Gain: Text Isle also featuring work by

• Stella Zhang
• Robin Dintiman
• Sha Sha Higby
• Chelsea Stewart
  

Keith and Rae write

Turtle island. Text isle. We are marking our emotion, arked on the coast of the ring of fire. Swollen with a haunting at a vista point in the mineral epoch of the Anthropocene, we take off our shoes and cobble an active studio: everyday objects, food, tea, the unheard hum of the ever-expanding universe, and our attachments. All unmake-remake their places. In the swirl of landscape transformations, catastrophic Fires-Floods-Earthquakes-Tsunamis, how do we create beyond the apocalyptic?

Reconstruction-destruction of the geologic environment pushes on ancient frames, describes our interdependence, co-senses and inscribes our implications. If we look, listen, drink, and breathe in the loss of the known, what do we exhale? Anguish? Wonder? Ecstasy?

The presence of grief is woven in experience, spooled by polarities. Here, these artists are compelled to work in this dualism to transform emotions that bind into a boundless sky of empathy; into affirming arrays of address and inquiry. What can we do when the not-knowing of mystery looms? Spin and weave.

In poetic irony, attempts along lines of different experiences create convergences while attempts along lines of similar experiences create divergences. The weave of these moments cleave off shadows of impressions—in our social lives, family histories, lost selves, and friends grown away; stories of wounds and marks that stretch our bodies to the limits of muscle and movement; ovulation and the tissue of birth processes.

What might we, as participants, drop? What might we yet hold? And what holds us?