Performance | Performance Art: Emily Mast's Everything, Nothing, Something, Always (Walla!)

The medium of theater has been adapted to an exhibition context in order to stage a conversation-cum-argument between five characters who represent various aspects of the artist’s psyche. Through spoken language and movement, these representations of the complex self turn the artistic process inside out for the viewer, thus opening it up for examination.

The performance itself is a time-based installation that takes the form of a one-act live theatrical play looping for three hours, varying slightly with each repetition and simultaneously acting as a performative “sculpture” in the center of the exhibition space, visible from all angles. The characters on stage are faced with seated actors who play a (very reactionary) artificial audience. The actual audience is encouraged to question their role in the space: they watch not only the play, but also another audience watching a play, all the while looking across the exhibition space and through the play at each other.

Embracing artifice, caricature and parody, the script teases out earnest existential dilemmas in the face of artistic production via melodrama, cliché, and self-reflexivity. The result is simultaneously sincere and ironic, humorous and serious.

Emily Mast is endlessly inclined to consider the nature of nothingness. She works primarily with performance, installation and writing. She has had solo shows at Samson Projects in Boston, The Paris Project Room in Paris and the Roski Gallery in Los Angeles. She has collaborated with numerous actors, dancers, writers, composers, choreographers, musicians and visual artists in Paris, Mexico, Portland and Los Angeles. She was a resident artist at Skowhegan in 2006 and participated in the Mountain School of Art in LA and United Nations Plaza in Berlin in 2007. In 2008 she curated the show “Egoesdayglo” at Five Thirty Three Gallery in Los Angeles.

Free popcorn.

Visitors are encouraged to drop by anytime between 6-9pm. There is no official beginning or end.