Description
BODIES OF WORK is a collaborative document which began formally with a series of ekphrastic text-images exchanges in the Spring of 2016. However, informally, it represents the gathering and making concrete of a history of creative dialogue and friendship, going back to 1985, when two small humans met in a schoolyard in the East Village. Although the initial exchange was one we thought to publish in a volume and perhaps show in a physical location, the project continued to evolve as potentially something more substantive; the emergent collection includes both the ekphrastic experiments presented as an example of a wider framework of the ongoing, creative exchange between practitioners across fields we’ve now shared for most of our lives. We sought here too to offer ways in which experiments around a shared questioning of the embodied self and its representation shows up in selections of each of our solo work in various media, presented here in conversation with that of the other. The volume also includes HEARTBEATS.EXE :: ABSTRACT [BODY], a collection of texts by New York City poets curated and facilitated by Elæ for a performance at Peninsula Art Space in November 2019, in response to Georgia’s HEARTBEATS exhibit, alongside images from that show. This project is being designed and edited by the artists, and will be released through the OS & Liminal Lab. Through it, we hope not only to celebrate the value of this ongoing exchange in our own practices, but also to offer possibilities for ways in which others might choose to document and share not only the shiny outcomes but also the messy, longterm, spaces and traces of shared inspiration and conversation that are so essential to the life of creative making.
