Taxi! intervention (not hailed cabs) @ Not Sent Letters
On Friday evening I, alongside my generous and esteemed collaborator Lori Weidenhammer, undertook my first experiment in what will be a series of experiments and ongoing interventions (“Transactions”) around Helen Potrebenko’s 1975 novel Taxi!
Thank you to everyone who engaged with both Lori and I. Lori was deployed as Security Guard (Insecurity) and as you’ll see from the photo documentation (again thanks to a varied bunch of snappers) I was installed in the Taxi! rank. It was an embodiment piece that sought to recontextualize the experience of reading and being read to. It also was an inquiry into the conditions by which we read and how might we read a forgotten text over an available and advertised text.
I have more to write about this intervention. I was grateful to Helen Potrebenko and her husband Earl for turning out and supporting the piece. Also a huge thank you to Charlene Vickers for hosting the event at her studio space and Jeremy Todd for creating space for it. It was a fascinating experience to have such an engagement with readers. And as usual within performance art offered surprise, learning and took me in directions I could not have conceived of. For now I offer some photos of what took place.
(Also thank you to Jeremy Isao Speier for his precise, diligent work on the sign)
I have a read a couple of How to Make a Wooden Sign instructions, that were not divinely inspiring. I am curious as to how it will stand and stay upright and thinking of a brick’s assistance. Next I have to consider the proximity the sign will stand to the performance. I am looking forward to talking it all up with wunderbar Lori and am glad to be working with her again after this week’s praiseach.
We laughed so much during our collaboration Big Mamas Ridin’ High for Chaos at Open Space.
Today is Nollaig na mBan. I filled the teapot many times and thought about the labour of women.