March 28, 2015
33°F
Farewell to winter. Winter Shack Season Finale with readings by Alison Kinney, Oona Patrick, Daniel Borzutzky and animations, video, and sound work by Emily Shanahan, Alex Branch, and Nicole Antebi
+
Once upon a time in European art history, the Grim Reaper didn’t wear a black hood. In medieval danses macabres, it’s the living who wore the hoods (and cloaks, hats, shoes, and other weather-appropriate gear), because presumably only the living feel the cold. Death’s black hood emerged within an iconographic tradition that ascribed death, danger, and violence to enemies–especially when those enemies were also one’s victims. Now, when everybody from executioners to opera stars, presidents to babies, wears hoods, the rhetoric lingers, evoking everything from death to the wind chill factor. Sometimes a hood is just a hood; sometimes it heralds the end of days.
Alison Kinney’s book of cultural history, Hood, will be published by Bloomsbury’s Object Lessons series in January 2016. Her essays have appeared in The Atlantic, Hyperallergic, Narratively, and The Mantle.
+
Emily Shanahan’s work addresses how the body exchanges and transmits information. Through the medium of performance and video, my work locates the body’s historic and problematic relationship to the mediated image, as well as the notion of the gesture as a communicative, cultural, and political construction. In the video “Forecast (1954, 1966, 1974, 1987, 1990, 2002, 2013)”, gestures derived from weather forecasts spanning from the first televised broadcast in 1954 to the present are re-performed. This chronological progression traces the relationship between presenter, screen and viewer, with the body acting as a vehicle for this archive.
Emily Shanahan holds an MFA from California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, CA and a BFA from Concordia University, Montreal, QC. Her work has been shown in Berlin, Norway, Singapore, Los Angeles, New York, and most recently as part of the Louisiana Biennial in Ruston, LA. She has been an artist in residence at the Vermont Studio Center for the Arts in 2010, as well as a 2012 participant in Tropical Lab 6, Singapore. Her artist’s book, THE TICK VS. THE HUM, was published by Golden Spike Press in early 2015.
+
Oona Patrick will read a story from her hometown’s maritime history that haunted her, both for the theme of entrapment and for the way that the sounds of Morse Code, a basic but now overlooked form of communication, allowed the unlikely transmission and survival of certain messages.
Oona Patrick is a writer who grew up among artists and salvagers in Provincetown, Massachusetts, and also spent part of her childhood living aboard a leaky wooden sailboat. She has since done residencies in the Azores Islands in the mid-Atlantic, in southern Portugal, and in Provincetown dune shacks. Her work has appeared most recently in the Provincetown Art Guide, Guernica, and The Puritan. She lives in Brooklyn and is a 2014 Fellow in Nonfiction Literature from the New York Foundation for the Arts.
+
Daniel Borzutzky’s books and chapbooks include, among others, In the Murmurs of the Rotten Carcass Economy (2015), Bedtime Stories For The End of the World! (2015), Data Bodies (2013), The Book of Interfering Bodies(2011), and The Ecstasy of Capitulation (2007). He has translated Raúl Zurita’s The Country of Planks (2015) and Song for his Disappeared Love (2010), and Jaime Luis Huenún’s Port Trakl (2008). His work has been supported by the Illinois Arts Council, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Pen/Heim Translation Fund. He lives in Chicago.
+
Nicole Antebi works in non-fiction animation, motion graphics, installation while simultaneously connecting and creating opportunities for other artists through larger curatorial and editorial projects such as Water, CA and The Winter Shack. Her work has been shown in many places including High Desert Test Sites, The Manhattan Bridge Anchorage, Teeny Cine’s converted trailer, Portable Forest, a Texas Grain Silo and in the cabin of a capsized ship at Machine Project, Los Angeles.
+
Alex Branch is a sculptor and independent curator based in Brooklyn, NY. In addition to Winter Shack she has organized shows on both the east and west coasts, including the exhibition Between The Walls, a permanent exhibition sealed within the crawl space of a building in upstate New York.
wintershack.org 