SOUNDING LINE: AN URBAN WALK
ASU Art Museum, Nelson Fine Arts Center
51 E 10th St, Tempe, AZ 85281
Saturday, April 15
4pm-7pm
To mark the final day of the exhibition Hannah Barco: Fathomings, Barco invites the public to gather at the kitchen counter she has built within the ASU Art Museum. Having assembled the installation as a collection of perspectives, she will facilitate a participatory event to carry these ways of seeing out into the world. In this performance, Barco shares her practice of urban walking as a method of attuning oneself to the world and questioning one's place within it.
Visitors are invited to gather at ASU Art Museum at 4pm. We will depart for the walk at dusk and conclude by sunset. Come prepared to physically carry pieces of the exhibition.
We recommend participants wear good walking shoes and leave large bags and purses at home.
Preceding the event, join the artist for an inverse housewarming — an open house from 11am to 4pm at the ASU Art Museum — to dismantle this temporary home and prepare to lay bare its fragments in the evening's walk.
Hannah Barco: Fathomings
ASU Art Museum, Nelson Fine Arts Center
51 E 10th St, Tempe, AZ 85281
February 4th-April 15th, 2017
Hannah and Andrew Barco, The Promenade of Plywood, 1 of 8 performances for We’ll Meet You There, 2013
How do we proceed with competency and aplomb in a world we can’t fully fathom? Hannah Barco’s research-based project dives into the myriad ways that scholars find footing in this murky landscape, working to make our physical, political and social realities more legible and coherent. For Fathomings, Barco assembles an installation to occupy the gallery with these various perspectives. At the end of the exhibition, she will host a participatory public performance that stages the installation’s undoing.
Barco, who lives and works in Chicago, is a performance artist, object maker, and facilitator of group performances in urban settings. Her work is infused with an uncanny approach to objects and actions, a sense of humor and poetry, and the belief that the personal is political. She received a BFA from The School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and an MFA in Performance from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. In her 2013 project, Things to Come, she walked the same route from her apartment to a Chicago gallery in the same distinctive clothes for thirty days, each day carrying a selected, domestic object, like a lamp, cereal box, or globe. To document the performance she had acquaintances photograph her comings and goings without making their presence known. The culminating activity was the Duchampian collection of objects bundled together in the gallery, along with text and images of her walks.
Barco’s project is in collaboration with projectWALK through the Museum of Walking (www.museumofwalking.org). The larger context for her residency is a series of events in Phoenix—one of the least walkable cities in the US—considering the everyday activity of walking and its surprisingly central role in contemporary art, social and cultural history, human health, and sustainable lifestyles.
Supported by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and the Helme Prinzen Endowment.