Salt Lake City Performance Art Festival

Marilyn Arsem has been creating and performing live events for more than forty years, presenting her work in thirty countries around the globe. Based in Boston, Massachusetts, USA, she also teaches performance art workshops internationally. A book on her work, Responding to Site: The Performance Work of Marilyn Arsem, edited by Jennie Klein and Natalie Loveless, was recently published by Intellect Books of the UK.

I live in Boston near a large public park, and have taken walks there every day during the pandemic. Winter used to mean mounds of snow and below-zero temperatures from December through March. That has changed with global warming, and the weather is no longer predictable. Nevertheless, the trees still lost their leaves in the fall, shrubs and grasses turned brown, and all became dormant. Even without snow the landscape appears barren. But I know that as the daylight gradually increases, new growth begins.

On Friday, April 2nd, I will go out into the park, and using my phone I will livestream my search for evidence of spring emerging. Please join me – perhaps not simply by watching to see what I discover, but also by going outdoors at the same time to look for signs of spring in your own neighborhood.

Myriam Laplante is a Canadian artist based in Bevagna, Italy, in a state of permanent doubt. She works in performance, installation, video, painting, sculpture, drawings, etc. If an image is from something that exists, it becomes a photograph. If it needs a different shape, it’s a painting or a drawing. If it can’t be flat, it’s a sculpture. If it has to move it’s a performance, if it has to move defying the laws of gravity, it’s a video. If it can’t decide, it’s an installation, usually with a performance.

Her works have been presented extensively from squats to museums in Europe, North America, and Asia. She has been working with the performance collective Black Market International since 2001.

Her works are in the public collections of the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna (Rome) and the Museo di Arte Contemporanea (Rome), the Galerie Nationale du Québec (Québec) and the National Museum of Photography (Ottawa), Musée de Rimouski (Canada), Museo Ettore Fico (Turin), and the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa (Wellington).

My work for this online festival is a reflection on the value of the artist’s physical presence and the need to analyze this phenomenon, to appease our yearning for explanations, interpretations, definitions, categorizations, elucidations, ….

Do you really have to be there? Between certainty and disbelief, there is doubt.

Lisa DeFrance (1967, Billings, MT, US) is a textile & performance artist. Principal in the performance art group Tripod for 12 years with performance/happenings throughout the US & Europe – group founded in 1994 in Seattle, WA. She received a BS in Apparel Design from OSU in Corvallis, OR (1990). Later moving from Seattle to SLC in 2003, she received her Master of Arts in Teaching from Westminster College (2010). She and her husband, Steve Creson, have studios at The Bogue Foundry.

Kristina Lenzi (1966, Salt Lake City, UT, USA) lives in Midvale, Utah. She holds a BFA from the University of Utah in drawing and painting and an MFA from Tufts University in affiliation with the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston in multidisciplinary art. She teaches art at Weber State University. Lenzi is the founder and curator of Salt Lake City Performance Art Festival. She has performed throughout the United States, and in Europe, and has exhibited her drawings and paintings nationally.

Two women facing each other iron white shirts while having a conversation.

Sam Forlenza, PhD is a visual artist, a book artist, and a retired clinical psychologist, with a longstanding interest in the nexus between art and psychology. His art training includes work with Marilyn Arsem. In the late 1960s he was involved with Happenings.

In the rich tradition of Automatism, where there are no preconceived ideas and without regard to content or subject matter, Sam will seek to harness “the creativity of the unconscious mind” in the act of artistic creation. The goal of this entirely spontaneous piece is to provide viewers the opportunity to witness the birth and formation of a never-before-seen work of art. By the conclusion, a new artwork will be totally or substantially completed. The audience will share in the anticipation and excitement of being there At the Creation.

Paola Paz Yee (1978) is a multidisciplinary visual artist focused on performance art, photography and social artistry. Her studies are on photography and sculpture.

In recent years she has worked with her Project called PAS, through collective murals and activation of vulnerable communities, calling herself an action device. She taught performance art at the Museo Universitario del Chopo in México city for two years and has since taught at different institutions or organizations around the world.

Her work has been exhibited extensively in Central and South America, Europe, and Asia. It has been published in the magazines Geifco Action Art Magazine in Barcelona, catalog V and VI of Action Art from the Autonomous University of Mexico, UNAM, Interjeck catalog, PRRS Catalog, Arte Acción y performance en los muchos Méxicos book and Mgyar mühely 189 magazine.

Since 2012 she has worked national and international curatorships for the Art Space Gallery, Ex Teresa Arte Actual Museum in Mexico, for the platform of Latin American artists PERFOLINK in Chile as well as at the Transart Communication festival in Eastern Europe.

Yee’s work addresses issues such as identity, gender violence, questions about production and time. Her actions determine a political position in her own context as a Latin American woman.

Guadalupe Neves is a university professor and researcher and a multimedia and performance artist. As a performer, she was co-founder of the Almarmada group along with four other artists (1992-1997), a group that created performance events in Argentina and Mexico (Museo ExTeresa, México DF).

She is in charge of directing the Research Project Memory, drifts and collective practices from the body-city problem in the city in the period 2005-2015 inside and outside the art system settled in the National University of Art (UNA).

She has participated in various shows and Performance Festivals in the Argentine Republic, and in International Festivals: Montevideo Performance Festival (National School of Art, Montevideo, Uruguay), Intransit (Animal Gallery, Chile), La Bas Festival (Helsinki, Finland), Nippon International Performance Art Festival, (in the cities of Tokyo, Nagoya, Nagano and Saitama in Japan); InfrAction Séte (France), Inf Action Venezia 2011, Live Action Gothenburg (Sweden) Live Action Venezia I, II, and III (Venice 2013, 2015 , 2017), 7ª11d (Toronto, Canada), Live Biennal (Vancouver, Canada), PEPA and Wostell Museum (Malpartida, Spain).

Memory of Body is the title of one of Lygia Clark´s works. So, this performance is a kind of tribute to her work. In times of pandemic I feel the need to reflect on who we are and our world. This performance asks about the things we won and lost in 2020. I wonder if our world has been transformed forever. Or maybe this is one more illusion among many others.

Alexander Del Re is an educator, curator, organizer and performance artist, with a career spanned for more than 25 years; to this date he has presented his work in more than 20 countries of Europe, Asia and the Americas.

He has been guest curator of the international performance art festivals Interakcje, in Poland and Blow! in Germany. He is co-founder and director of PerfoLink, Latin American platform for performance art; since 2009 to this date he has curated and co-organized 15 international performance art festivals and many smaller events in Venezuela, Mexico, Uruguay and Chile, presenting the work of more than 130 artists from 18 countries. Recently, he has presented his performances at the International Festivals Venice Performance Art Week, Venice, Italy, Transart Communication Festival in Slovakia and Hungary, and at ArTrend International Performance Art Festival, Taipei, Taiwan.

My work is called Exercises of Reality. It’s about an exploration of what is the concept of reality in a pandemic world, in which our presence is no longer physical, our interaction with each other is mediated through technological devices, so performance art is stuck in between the “real” and “virtual” realms.

Cynthia Post Hunt is a curator and artist based in Northwest Arkansas. Through a fluid practice of connection and collaboration, Post Hunt explores commonalities within the shared human experience. Practice as research, she creates rituals, games and gestures surrounding the self, loss, and death. Time, memory, and the body are integral materials in her work. Post Hunt is the programmer of dance and theater at the Momentary and the co-founder of INVERSE performance art festival. She holds a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and is currently pursuing her MA in curating from Aarhus University.

In the wake of her grandfather’s passing, the artist will perform a reimagining of his last breath.

Eugene Tachinni was born in Shiprock, New Mexico and grew up in Kirtland, New Mexico, a border-town next to the Navajo reservation. He has a BFA, MAT, and MFA from the University of Utah. He teaches art and sewing classes at Weber State University and Salt Lake Community College. Eugene also works from home making art and constructing custom made garments. He is a son, brother, uncle, artist, and educator.

2020 was an extraordinary and exceptional year full of craziness and uncertainty. Among all the drama that was swirling around us, my home of 18 plus years was taken from me. Well, it felt that way anyway. With two weeks notice our landlord sold his apartment complex which meant that our rent was going to skyrocket, which it did. The whole experience of new owners, property managers, strangers parading thru my home, and looking into owning a home pushed me to an edge I don’t think I’ve ever known. I never ever want to feel that again. While this performance doesn’t show the trauma of my experience, it’s about movement, how we get to one place to the next. It seems that is often how it is, we see others in their end destinations and often don’t know the traumas and joy of the movement.

Gretchen Reynolds is a puppeteer, painter, and performance artist.

A short and reasonable facsimile of the intimate.

Alexandra Barbier is an artist full of questions and quirk who values curiosity, collaboration, and risk-taking. She is primarily a dance artist and holds an MFA in Modern Dance, but dips her hands into several creative jars. She believes in trying something just because she can, just to see what happens if… Evading the mundane is the driving force of her daily life and creative endeavors.

Tell Me Something Good! is a celebration of YOU… your achievements, your successes, your existence. Did you recently graduate? Get a new pet? Wake up and survive another day in this dreary world? I’ll throw confetti for you, sing you a song, give a champagne toast, do a tap dance in your honor, give you everything I’ve got! Tell me your good news: https://www.abarbier.com/contact

Emmett Wilson is a fluid artist in regard to their identity as well as the performances they make. They often play and fumble with roles, gestures, and props in an effort to tell a personal (that is, political) story made up of stories we tell ourselves, referencing scripts, literature, and lyrics, all to say or sing or move through one true thing at a time about love. They work with fellow artists, and the spaces in which they perform, as well as with witnesses or audience members who are usually invited (but not obligated) to slip into a more active role while sharing the moment. Emmett grew up in Houston, then grew up some more in Salt Lake City and has recently relocated to the east coast where they were accepted as a resident at the Headlong Performance Institute in Philadelphia. Emmett has worked in many capacities with a Salt Lake City based experimental opera company called DEXO, toured solo-work around the country and in Berlin, and taught a workshop to queer youth groups and a smattering of adults called ‘Embodied Imagination’ to find and physicalize alter-egos. This is Emmett’s third year performing in the Salt Lake City Performance Art Festival- they previously performed The Spectre and Shm00fi3zz with co-conspirators, Molly Mostert and Natalie Allsup-Edwards.

Take care to take care is mail art in the making, inspired by the populist practice of mailing art through the postal service (expressly coined by artists in the fluxus movement) and those that I’ve been in correspondence with since March of 2020.

Gabrielle Civil is a black feminist performance artist, poet, and writer, originally from Detroit, MI. She has premiered fifty performance works around the world, most recently dancing in Wild Beauty at Velocity in Seattle (2020). Her performance memoirs include Swallow the Fish (2017), Experiments in Joy (2019), and (ghost gestures) (2021). A 2019 Rema Hort Mann LA Emerging Artist, she currently teaches at the California Institute of the Arts. The aim of her work is to open up space.

(big feelings) (inner space) (shining skin)
the black woman performance artist enters the gleam
how to build a sequence of something?
revel in amplified time // out-of-this-world

Lena Chen & Michael Charles Neumann are a performance duo exploring the limits of intimacy. Their practice celebrates and interrogates the all-consuming nature of love: a force both beautiful and violent, blinding and revelatory, debilitating and transformative. Merging their interests in one-to-one performance and digitally mediated experiences, they enact site-specific durational works that invite viewers to project their desires and fears. By performing affection, care, and conflict in public view, we invite witnesses to ask how a relationship exists in the context of the sociopolitical structures in which it is embedded.

Crosswind Landing explores the desire to see and be seen. Technology collides with the gaze of the Other as an energy exchange unfolds between the artists at various natural and man-made “crossings.” The durational site-specific performance is an attempt to bridge the impassable distance between intimate partners in the age of screen-mediated relationships.