Joey Orr
Joey Orr is the Mellon Curator for Research at the Spencer Museum of Art at the University of Kansas, where he directs the Arts Research Integration and is affiliate faculty in Museum Studies and Visual Art. Previously he served as the Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Curatorial Fellow at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, where his major project aligned three exhibitions around artistic research. Recent writing has been published in Art Papers, Art Journal Open, BOMB, Hyperallergic, Journal for Artistic Research (Network Reflections), and Sculpture. Juried writing has been published by Art & the Public Sphere, Images, Journal of American Studies, QED, Visual Methodologies, and a chapter in the volume Rhetoric, Social Value, and the Arts (Palgrave Macmillan). His forthcoming book, A Sourcebook of Performance Labor, will be released by Routledge Press in November 2022. He holds an MA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a PhD from Emory University and currently serves on the editorial board for Ground Works.
Supervisors: Angelika Bammer, Jason Francisco, Elizabeth Wilson, Margaret Olin, David Getsy, and Maud Lavin
Supervisors: Angelika Bammer, Jason Francisco, Elizabeth Wilson, Margaret Olin, David Getsy, and Maud Lavin
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The last time I saw Thater was in 2016. We were walking through the Streeterville neighborhood in Chicago, and she pointed out some birds perched on the portico of a building, noting their species and what was interesting about their appearance given the time of year. I had not even noticed the birds, but she left me on the corner thinking about the animals with which I shared the city. Thater’s body of work prods us to imagine the lives of other species, making connections she sees as critical to all of our survival. Her new work, Yes, there will be singing, conjures an architectural encounter with whale song through live video streaming. For her, even our present moment of isolation is filled with interspecies relation.
At the time of this writing I have not been in the Spencer Museum of Art, where I work, in eight weeks. The emptiness of vacated spaces really underscores what I am missing in a time when politics are failing us, and museum and exhibition spaces are closed. As a curator, one of my most important jobs is to get artists’ voices into public discourse. It’s funny now to think about Sugimoto’s series while introducing this interview with Lilly McElroy, wherein she describes hiding in the light, claiming that light sometimes exposes “a bright abyss.”
In her series I Control the Sun, the image of the sun on the horizon is always held in the circle of her hand. It is poetic to imagine a personal control that she can never achieve. In one of her most recent series, Sanding Away a Year’s Worth of Sunsets, she begins to physically wear away the light she’s captured from the sun in a year’s worth of photographs. Her defiant will in futile battle with the sun seems almost belligerent amid this deft performance. She’ll never win, of course, and she counts on her viewers understanding that fact in order to get at what’s human about making art. Her ability to manipulate the perception of light in her work reveals her inability, finally, to control it. She exposes herself as a photo-based artist by trying to control, extinguish, or as a last resort play tricks on the light—the very thing that defines her medium. As she says herself, “Absurdity is a protest.” Her Pandemic Self Portraiture series continues to wrestle with light and absurdity in a world transformed by a global virus.
The subject of the series is the one thing not represented in the work and precisely what cannot be realized in a time of self-quarantine: our touching bodies. Through sketches for protective gear for our new world, however, Ho addresses not only the immediate yearning for physical contact, but also how this need is symptomatic of something deeper that has become increasingly explicit. Our urgent need for acknowledging and acting on our shared and perilous fate has been compromised by institutions that have been failing us for some time. The vulnerable are made more vulnerable to the point of rupture, and our global interconnectedness is sacrificed again and again at the cost of our lives and the planet we inhabit. Emerging from simultaneous impulses toward despair and hope, Ho shares her thoughts about making, activism, immigration, and ecology.
The last time I saw Thater was in 2016. We were walking through the Streeterville neighborhood in Chicago, and she pointed out some birds perched on the portico of a building, noting their species and what was interesting about their appearance given the time of year. I had not even noticed the birds, but she left me on the corner thinking about the animals with which I shared the city. Thater’s body of work prods us to imagine the lives of other species, making connections she sees as critical to all of our survival. Her new work, Yes, there will be singing, conjures an architectural encounter with whale song through live video streaming. For her, even our present moment of isolation is filled with interspecies relation.
At the time of this writing I have not been in the Spencer Museum of Art, where I work, in eight weeks. The emptiness of vacated spaces really underscores what I am missing in a time when politics are failing us, and museum and exhibition spaces are closed. As a curator, one of my most important jobs is to get artists’ voices into public discourse. It’s funny now to think about Sugimoto’s series while introducing this interview with Lilly McElroy, wherein she describes hiding in the light, claiming that light sometimes exposes “a bright abyss.”
In her series I Control the Sun, the image of the sun on the horizon is always held in the circle of her hand. It is poetic to imagine a personal control that she can never achieve. In one of her most recent series, Sanding Away a Year’s Worth of Sunsets, she begins to physically wear away the light she’s captured from the sun in a year’s worth of photographs. Her defiant will in futile battle with the sun seems almost belligerent amid this deft performance. She’ll never win, of course, and she counts on her viewers understanding that fact in order to get at what’s human about making art. Her ability to manipulate the perception of light in her work reveals her inability, finally, to control it. She exposes herself as a photo-based artist by trying to control, extinguish, or as a last resort play tricks on the light—the very thing that defines her medium. As she says herself, “Absurdity is a protest.” Her Pandemic Self Portraiture series continues to wrestle with light and absurdity in a world transformed by a global virus.
The subject of the series is the one thing not represented in the work and precisely what cannot be realized in a time of self-quarantine: our touching bodies. Through sketches for protective gear for our new world, however, Ho addresses not only the immediate yearning for physical contact, but also how this need is symptomatic of something deeper that has become increasingly explicit. Our urgent need for acknowledging and acting on our shared and perilous fate has been compromised by institutions that have been failing us for some time. The vulnerable are made more vulnerable to the point of rupture, and our global interconnectedness is sacrificed again and again at the cost of our lives and the planet we inhabit. Emerging from simultaneous impulses toward despair and hope, Ho shares her thoughts about making, activism, immigration, and ecology.
This book reorients well-known works of contemporary performance and social practice around the workers who have shaped, enacted, and supported them. It emerges from perspectives on maintenance, care, affective labor, and the knowledges created and preserved through gesture and intersubjectivity. This compilation of interviews is filled with the voices of collaborators in notable works attributed to established contemporary artists, including Francis Alÿs, Tania Bruguera, Suzanne Lacy, Ernesto Pujol, Asad Raza, Dread Scott, and Tino Sehgal. In the spirit of the artworks under discussion, this book reinvests in the possibilities for art as a collective effort to explore new ways of finding ourselves in others and others in ourselves. This collection is a contribution for further theorizing a largely unaddressed perspective in contemporary art.