CARRIAGE

by Matty Davis and Ben Gould

 

Sunday, May 6, 2018

7:00PM–9:00PM (performance begins promptly at 7:15PM)

Human Resources, 410 Cottage Home St, Los Angeles, CA 90012

FREE

 

Carriage is a site-responsive performance created by Matty Davis and Ben Gould that radically explores control and empathy, motored in part by the raw energy of Gould’s Tourette Syndrome.

This performance is informed by evolving senses of the body—injury, trauma, healing, and growth—and offers a unique opportunity to create a work that draws from the variance of Davis and Gould’s distinct physicalities. The result is an intense, viscerally and sonically charged experience, where empathy is a physical tool, resistance offers stability, and we are all cast out into a space that levels us, brings us real fear, awakening, new vocabularies and physical structures.

 

This year the work travels the U.S. with performances in a wide range of sites, responding to the ground and the way surfaces offer the body resistance and support. From ice, to grass, to concrete, and within a wide variety of architectures, the work continuously evolves and re-composes itself according to the unique visual, sonic, and kinesthetic possibilities of each location. Upcoming, Carriage will be presented in partnership with Lightbox in Detroit, MI on June 9, 2018, and upon a boat on the Chicago River later that month.

 

Carriage has been workshopped in New York City at Judson Church, the Watermill Center, the Edward F. Albee Foundation, the Philadelphia School, and Queenslab. It was supported through a residency at the Kickstarter Headquarters in NYC.

 

You may view Held Over Shore, a 16mm short film based on Carriage made with artist Eryka Dellenbach here: https://vimeo.com/246698783/981a46c5a2

 

Matty Davis is an artist from Pittsburgh, PA, where his grandfather worked for decades in the steel mills. His interdisciplinary work seeks embodied transformation, often through collaboration with other people, materials, and landscapes. Described by the New Yorker as “fearless,” his work is noted for its combination of intense, imaginative physicality and intimacy. Recently, Davis has been invested in how particular conditions of the body, the elements, and the ground necessarily impact kinesthesia, energy systems, and psychological states, partially in relation to having undergone intensive hand surgery last year due to a saw accident. In 2012, he co-founded and continues to co-artistic direct BOOMERANG, a performance project based in New York City. His work has been presented by the Art Institute of Chicago, Steppenwolf Theater, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Judson Church, the 92nd St. Y, the Watermill Center, Dixon Place, Danspace Project, and the Arts Arena in Paris, among others. He was the recipient of a 2016 Visual Arts Fellowship from the Edward F. Albee Foundation, and has recently been an artist-in-residence at the Watermill Center and Kickstarter’s HQ in Brooklyn. Davis teaches at colleges and schools throughout the US, including New York University, Columbia College, Oberlin College, Muhlenberg College, Kenyon College, The Professional Performing Arts High School in New York, and The Philadelphia School. More information is available at www.mattydavis.net

 

Ben Gould is an artist currently living and working in New York City. After being diagnosed with Tourette Syndrome, Gould’s studio practice has transformed to harbor a new investment in the body, exploring limits, resistance, and the loss of control. Grounded in performance, his multidisciplinary practice is built upon collaboration, intimacy, and urgency – cultivated by a deep interest in how energy is directed, rerouted, transformed and transferred. His condition has become an engine for movement-based performance work that is in search of stabilization, and driven by an evolving practice of energetic restraint and release. Within a growing mythos, a space for fantasy and freedom is created for the corresponding videos, images, and objects that emerge from this process. Gould has performed site-specific works across the country, from varied geographies to institutional spaces – leading to solo exhibitions at Plug Projects in Kansas City and Ballroom Projects in Chicago, and collaborations with musicians, rock climbers, singers, and designers. Gould has apprenticed with master craftsmen in California, was a 2015 Ox-Bow Fellow, and a Kickstarter Artist in Residence in 2017. He was born in Grass Valley, California in 1993 and was raised there, in the foothills of the Sierra Mountains, next to a decommissioned gold mine and a river. Most recently he has performed and shown new works in Kansas City, San Antonio, Miami, and at the Watermill Center and Judson Church in New York. More information is available at www.bengould.net

 

Clothing by Gabriella Lacza

Produced by Jade Thacker

Photograph by Devin Yalkin