Dead Body

April 22 @ 9:00 am - April 28 @ 9:00 am

Event Website/Tickets  

DEAD BODY
IN SEVEN ACTIONS

STEPHEN MUELLER
New Performances

APRIL 22–28, 2024
In-gallery viewing hours: 9am–9pm daily
Window viewing hours: 9pm–9am daily
1. SOUVENIR (ongoing throughout)
2. BEST FRIEND (24 hours) | April 22–23, 9am–9am
3. SEQUIN (24 hours) | April 23–24, 9am–9am
4. JAGUARUNDI (24 hours) | April 24–25, 9am–9am
5. HELPING HAND (24 hours) | April 25–26, 9am–9am
6. EVERYTHING (24 hours) | April 26–27, 9am–9am
7. NOTHING (24 hours) | April 27–28, 9am–9am
ARTSPEAK GALLERY

Arts Council Windsor & Region
1942 Wyandotte St E

Poster design and layout by Julie Hall
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DEAD BODY is a series of seven durational performances, responding to several years of chronic depression, making mistakes, and not making art.

Six consecutive twenty-four-hour performances will be framed within and contextualized by a seventh ongoing performance, which will interrupt the others every four hours for the entire six days. In chronological order, each twenty-four-hour performance will examine a particular insight, event, or overarching feeling: the origins of deficiency, the origins of self-consciousness, illusion, erasure, disclosure, and absence.

Keywords: branch; chair; doppelgänger; figure skater; flame; flowers; ghost; gold leaf; green screen; hand; ice; kneel; log; metronome; sleeping bag; soil; table; timer; wallpaper.

STATEMENT

I use my body to make long durational works about depression, loss, futility, and loneliness. I usually perform them live for several hours, days, or weeks, but sometimes I perform alone in front of a camera. Occasionally, I’ll create interactive or participatory installations with objects that others can touch or perform with, but I prefer solitary repetition and slow scenes. I’m interested in reflections and reverberations, and the universality of aloneness. I want to amplify aloneness and explore it as an aesthetic. I do that by moving slowly and deliberately through improvised actions and re-performances, and by being there and continuing to do that, even when nobody’s around. I’m interested in melancholic spaces. I’m interested in conjuring palpable intimacy to create delicate and transitory connections between myself and others. To do that I endure analogous representations until the performance stops feeling like a performance. Then I keep going. I miss a lot of feelings and moments and things, so I try to recreate them. I think we all do that. I find it hard to relax but I want to. I wonder if you feel that way too.

BIO

Stephen Mueller is a performance and installation artist, arts worker, and arts educator based in Windsor, Ontario. He holds an MFA in Visual Arts from the University of Calgary and a BFA in Visual Arts from the University of Windsor. His work has been exhibited in Artist-Run Centres across Canada, including Open Space (Victoria), Eastern Edge (St. John’s), The New Gallery (Calgary), Latitude 53 (Edmonton), Forest City Gallery (London), and Artcite Inc. (Windsor). His durational performances have been featured in numerous festivals, including: Words and [ ]: A Durational Conference of Art and Thought (Montréal), the 2016 Duration and Dialogue Performance Art Festival (Toronto), M:ST 7 (Calgary), Visualeyez 13 (Edmonton) and the 2011 Art Gallery of Windsor Biennial, curated by Iain Baxter&. In April 2020, he initiated the collaborative Instagram project Performing Together. He is currently the Programming Director at Artcite Inc. and a sessional instructor at the University of Windsor School of Creative Arts.

stephen-mueller.com
@stephenmueller_performance

Artspeak Gallery

1942 Wyandotte Street East
Windsor, ON N8Y 1E4 Canada
Phone: 519-252-2787

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