Brody Condon "LevelFive and Future Gestalt"
On Stellar Rays
This event has ended.
On Stellar Rays presents LevelFive and Future Gestalt, two new videos by Brody Condon. Both works originated with recent performance projects at the Hammer Museum and Los Angeles County Museum of Art respectively.
Condon exacts a compelling investigation into a web of mid-20th century ideologies: the theorization of humans as bio-machines via Cybernetics, Minimalism’s engagement with the body as social space, and experimental theater’s recursive dialogue with group psychotherapy. The exhibition articulates an organizing timeline, starting with a fictitious self-actualization seminar and moving forward to an imaginary future heterotopia.
Future Gestalt is part sci-fi film, part participatory performance, and part experiential essay on the history of psychotherapeutic group encounters. Set in a now antiquated vision of the far future, five trained performers robed in vivid, diaphanous costume are subjected to open-ended performative psychotherapy techniques, specifically Gestalt group therapy, developed most famously by Fritz Perls in the 1940s. Tony Smith’s ‘shape shifting’ sculpture Smoke (1967), permanently installed at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, acts as the elaborate set and carnivorous potted plants as exotic props.
The performers are physically intertwined and interact directly with the monumental sculpture, which appears to embody the immaterial presence of the encounter group leader. It is unclear whether the faceted structure is an AI, inter-dimensional entity, or numinous vessel. Equally ambiguous are the origins of the characters, as each brings a distinct style of communication to the session, such as an operatic language of shrills, clicks, and whispers, or a synchronized choreography of movement and voice. Through the process of filming, unresolved tension between the production of temporary community, individual psychodrama and the precarious authority of the incomprehensible therapist create an alluring sense of suspense.
Media
Schedule
from March 04, 2012 to April 14, 2012
Opening Reception on 2012-03-04 from 18:00 to 20:00