Balancing Act

Balancing Act
By Merritt Johnson

Anita's Way
Passageway connecting West 42nd and 43rd Streets
Between Sixth Ave and Broadway
New York, NY

FREE 4-hour long durational performances on August 8, 15, 22 and 29, 2013 from 4 - 8 PM

Balance requires physical coordination, mental concentration, calm, and a sense of humor. Balance is on the brink of collapse in every direction. 

In this solo performance, Merritt Johnson focuses on the act of balancing, and on acting balanced. Using increasingly ridiculous physical action and exhaustive duration, Balancing Act embraces the awkwardness, tension and humor found in balancing: cultures, art, survival, family, form, function, physical and mental fitness.  

In a series of four, four hour performances Johnson will balance on the books: Art History by Marilyn Stokstad (Instructor Review copy), The Art of Color by Johannes Itten, The Beast And the Sovereign by Jacques Derrida, Power/Knowledge by Michel Foucault and Who Sings the Nation State by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Judith Butler. The books underfoot are alternately read aloud and balanced on the artist’s head as she simultaneously attempts to balance silver juice pouches, gold leafed plaster casts of applesauce cups, a bag of beads and a turkey feather. Every object used in Balancing Act is valuable, or represents value; all objects should be held up (balanced) in an equivalent fashion. Physical limitations mitigate this possibility and require constant rearranging of objects and recovery from falls. Visitors are invited to participate in the performance by adding or removing balanced objects from the artist’s body. 

About the artist:

Merritt Johnson is a multidisciplinary artist considering physical and material limitation, mediation of experience, and conditions for survival. Acknowledging that her actions as a woman of mixed Indigenous heritage are inherently political, her work broadly engages with survival across media.

Johnson performs in traditional and non-traditional locations, including the Migrant Professor series on the U.S./Canadian border and on top of the wall around the U.S. Capitol Building, and Museum Quality (in collaboration with Maria Hupfield) at the Denver Art Museum, UBC Museum of Anthropology and on the steps of the National Museum of the American Indian (New York). Her work is included in numerous private collections as well as the permanent collection of the Birmingham Museum of Art and the Museum of Contemporary Native Art.  Based in East Harlem, Johnson is of mixed Mohawk, Blackfoot and non-Indigenous descent.  Her work is a cross-disciplinary negotiation of discontinuity, exploring connections and oppositions between, and within, people and place. Her recent sculptures at the Museum of Contemporary Native Art (Santa Fe, NM) take opulent interior decoration as the material for camouflaging figures, muddying who is with, and without power. Her paintings collide landscape with redactions; sprayed, smeared or patterned, complicating visual access to the land.

Contact:
www.flashbanggiveaway.com
merrittejohnson@gmail.com