Saturday August 16, doors 8pm
UNHINGED
A night of performance by Sascha Altman DuBrul, Lydia Eccles, Marni Kotak, Felix Morelo and Matthew Silver
In conjunction with “Marni Kotak: Mad Meds”
Audience may enter and exit throughout the event
Microscope is very pleased to present a night of performance to take place in conjunction with “Marni Kotak: Mad Meds”, a durational performance and exhibition in which the artist is gradually withdrawing from psychiatric meds prescribed over 2 ½ years ago for postpartum depression following the birth of her child.
For this special evening, Kotak and artists Sascha Altman DuBrul, Lydia Eccles, Marni Kotak, Felix Morelo and Matthew Silver will activate the exhibition after hours with a series of performances celebrating the experience of madness unhinged from institutional labels, norms and boundaries.
Kotak opens with “What Goes On In My Mind When I’m Taking Less Drugs” using material from her thoughts and journal entries arising during her ongoing performance in the gallery. Sascha Altman DuBrul will perform “Mad Maps” with Kotak, sketching out pathways to assist the artist in maintaining her mental health as she attempts to live med-free. Felix Morelo offers “Free Advice” on how to live a happy and fulfilled life while Lydia Eccles will perform fragments from journals and letters about her evolving psychiatric non-compliance and her perilous escape from diagnosis and drugs over seven years. The night concludes with Matthew Silver’s “Love Is The Answer, But I’m Just a Wackadoodle Doo Doo”.
Approximately 60 minutes
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Felix Morelo is a Colombian/American artist born and based in New York City. He is a painter and performance artist, best known for his prolific output (more than 15,000) of chalk faces drawn on the sidewalks of New York City. Morelo is represented by Ideal Glass Gallery in New York City and currently lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Lydia Eccles, a.k.a. Universal Aliens, is concerned with the impact of technology on psyche and society. She is currently working on a documentary about the Church of Euthanasia,and recent projects include the movies “Collapse Interviews: A Gathering of People With Nothing In Common” and “Bad Sex (not as in naughty).”
Matthew Silver is a street performance artist who has been performing on Brooklyn and Manhattan streets for seven years as a Court Jester. His intention is to make the entire world laugh at nothing, as an act of peace. He will continue to perform on the street until he has achieved his desired outcome. His work is documented and has been featured in Brooklyn Paper, Gothamist, Paper Mag, Village Voice and Time Out NY.
Sascha Altman DuBrul is a writer and educator. He is founder of the Bay Area Seed Interchange Library, the first urban seed library in North America, and co-founded along with Jacks McNamara, The Icarus Project. DuBrul is also the author of Maps to the Other Side: The Adventures of a Bipolar Cartographer and a bunch of zines about riding freight trains, urban permaculture and the power of collective dreams.
Marni Kotak is a performance artist who makes multimedia works in which she presents everyday life being lived. In October 2011, she gave birth to her son as a live performance in her durational exhibition, The Birth of Baby X, at Microscope Gallery in Brooklyn, NY. Kotak’s works are currently on view at the Santiago Museum of Contemporary Art (Chile) and have previously exhibited at Artists Space, Exit Art, Momenta Art, English Kills Gallery, Grace Exhibition Space, among others.
