Friday, February 21, 2020 to Friday, March 27, 2020
Opening Reception - February 21, 2020, 6:30pm-8:30pm
View the exhibition text here.
Announcement from a lectern:
“We exist in a world where it feels especially important to have a stance, to be on a side. This isn’t a new feeling, but is an intensified, global, special breed of that feeling in 2020. Let’s talk about feelings. The polarization of the left and right gives us one goal, and that is above all, TO FIGHT — and be correct. Fight for something, fight for anything. If you are not fighting you are dead, you are uninteresting. The things we are fighting about are important, of course. But even the pursuit for neutrality is a fight. There is a right and a wrong. The grey areas are everywhere and nowhere. The extreme separation of schools of thought increase the anxiety levels for those who do not belong to either side. And every stance related to the identity of the social performer is, when all else is stripped away, only a performance is it not?
OH GOD I don’t know
...do I perform my politics?
OF COURSE I DO!”
The Readiness Potential is a performance-based installation, using movements and gestures from entertainment wrestling and military aerobics, performed and voiced by multiple bodies in the gallery space, atop wrestling mats. The featured video work, Intentional Binding, sees the artist grappling with pro- wrestler Cydoni Trusste (aka Rebel Kinney). This ongoing exploration seeks to embody non-specific social and political conflict, and hopes to create a form to physically and visually describe conflict. Rather than enacting subjective ideologies or outcomes, we are instead performing the multitude of possibilities between rivalling bodies. Debating figures push, pull, grab, and manipulate any advantages. They also require rest, space, breath, and rely on another being to shove off against. Our collaboration examines the ambiguity between physical aggression and tender embrace, investigating intuitive movement through the medium of wrestling.
Taylor Doyle is a performance and video artist existing between London, ON and London, UK. Her research explores the institutionalization of fitness culture, combative bodies, and intimacy in sport, navigating sociopolitical issues beyond the body through live performance. She completed her MFA (2019) at the Slade School of Fine Art. Her work has been shown and performed in spaces including Artlab Gallery (Western University), Vibrafusionlab, Whippersnapper Gallery, Videofag, Trinity Square Video, D’CLINIC studios, Chalton Gallery, Artworks Project Space- Barbican Arts Group Trust, and Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance. See The Readiness Potential live on the night of the opening.