Thursday October 25, 11 am – 7 pm & Friday, October 26, 11 am – 5 pm
Mirrors and Dresser Live Video Recording with Wynne Greenwood
Frye Art Museum
Free Admission and Parking
As part of the programming for the Frye’s new exhibition, Mw [Moment Magnitude], Henry Art Gallery performance artist and Stranger Genius Award Winner Wynne Greenwood will be live video-recording a music video project called Mirrors and Dresser. In this performance, Wynne will be re-creating The Women’s Spa, an installation she originally made in 2011 to explore security, transformation and isolation. The set is intended to encourage the public performance of a private process.
The Frye is also offering anyone who identifies themselves as a Friend of the Henry a 15 percent discount on coffee/espresso drinks during Wynne’s live video recording.
If you haven’t seen Mw [Moment Magnitude] yet or even if you have, these events are not to be missed!
Here is Wynne’s Artist Statement:
About Mirrors and Dresser
When I think of women’s spas (my own experience with women’s spas being limited to the Olympus Spa in Tacoma, WA), I think of a place to rest, and to witness rest. A space has been created whose function is to allow communal relaxation. Now, that being said, the spa costs a minimum of $35 to enter, and is limited to women who were born with female bodies. From my experience, the majority of customers are white. I mention these details and observations because I’m interested in, and concerned with, who has access to transformative processes, and why.
For Mirrors and Dresser, popular cartoon characters and mythic figures, like Pebbles Flintstone, Betty Boop and Medusa, will hang out in the women’s spa on spa maintenance day, watching each other have a body, holding space for becoming space, and praying for an end to isolation through nostalgia.
Pebbles has been a happy baby for 50 years. Medusa has been the monster for hundreds. How tiring. These are characters we insist upon, myths that we replay again and again. Why? Is it comfortable? Why do we seek comfort? Can we let our icons and our myths change? Can we let even the role or function of “icon” and “myth” change? Did you know Medusa was a mother? She gave birth out of her neck to twins, Pegasus and a giant, as she was beheaded.
I’m choosing these characters to talk about cultural exhaustion. I’m also choosing them to help me perform. To act out and then challenge my own cartoony definitions, to allow performance itself to expand by first exaggerating its boundaries and then letting them relax, stretch out, soak and rest. Not necessarily seeking comfort, but transformation and a more complicated existence.
–Wynne Greenwood
