Cara Viaggio
2007, 13:18 min. (video, color, sound)

My performance work evolved out of my training as both a dancer and visual artist.  These two disciplines have fostered my ongoing relationship to the mirror, and to my sense of self, or selves—initially in the mirrors of the dance and rehearsal studios, and eventually in an ongoing practice of self-portraiture. 

With Cara Viaggio I have continued my practice of examining, exploring, and expanding the possibilities of my instrument as a performer--the visual/kinetic/aural/dramatic body, as well as the intersection between performance and visual art, between the ephemeral and the tangible.  Instead of the mirror--or an audience--I here use the camera.  These video vignettes are intimate explorations of the heightened moment that Caravaggio so beautifully articulated; in addition to arriving at a recognizable semblance of these moments—my capacity to replicate the imagery in his paintings—I inhabit the moments both leading up, and following, these points, and flow in and out of “character.”

JOHN KELLY

www.johnkellyperformance.org    

John Kelly is a performance and visual artist who’s work began in New York’s East Village clubs in the early 1980’s, and has since been performed at many of the major performance and alternative venues, including PS 1, the Warhol Museum, the Whitney Biennial, the Edinburgh and Spoleto Festivals, and the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Next Wave Festival.

    Also a singer, he has sung the music of John Cage at the San Francisco Symphony, and collaborated and recorded with Laurie Anderson, David Del Tredici, Natalie Merchant and Antony and the Johnsons.   As an actor he created the role of the opera singer Bartell D’Arcy in the Broadway production of James Joyce’s The Dead.  He won a 2005 Eliot Norton Award for the role of Cupid in Christopher Marlowe’s Dido, Queen of Carthage, at American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge.

     He has won 2 Bessie Awards, 2 Obie Awards, and a 2001 CalArts Alpert Award.   Fellowships include the New York Foundation for the Arts, the NEA, the Greenwall Foundation, Art Matters, Inc., The Rockefeller Foundation, The Guggenheim Foundation, the P.S.1 National Studio Artist Program at The Clocktower, the 2004-05 Sargent-Faull Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University.

     He was recently a Guest Lecturer on Dramatic Arts at Harvard University; in 2001 the 2wice Arts Foundation, in association with Aperture published John Kelly, a monograph.