Jealousy

JEALOUSY, a dance/sculpture/light performance made site-specifically for theHAIR+NAILS storefront and spilling out into the sculpture garden.
Dance duo HIJACK (Kristin Van Loon & Arwen Wilder) and Lighting Designer Heidi Eckwall and Visual Artist Ryan Fontaine joined forces to build a new performance piece.

 

This new work fused visual and performing arts disciplines with all aspects leading. Our collaboration broke with the typical hierarchy in theater-making where so often a choreographer gets a gig and feeds lighting and set designers requests and parameters to flatter the dance. JEALOUSY is the collision and confluence of the four artists’ impulses: HIJACK makes ephemeral work, are obsessively frugal and any materials/props are made of used objects following the environmental edict: leave no traces.

Their dances invite audiences to speculate about relationship and imagine non-linear narrative meaning. Fontaine’s work is abstract, concerned with color and form, is often made of toxic resins and leaves large objects in the world. HIJACKlikes to make an audience choose what is important and where to look. Heidi’s signature lighting design is very precise specific direction of the eye. These apparent conflicts set the stage for rich collaboration and a thick, important performance. This piece turned you into the old man who watches the security camera behind his garage suspecting everyone who walks through the alley. Like any wall, the dance goes up and down, but not without consequence. If walls had eyes, if walls could talk…This dance was held together with packing tape, the set held together with packing tape, the lights are taped on, the lighting designer is pretending to be a documentarian. Criminal within and criminal without. The whole situation is precarious and non-biodegradable. The dancers are your secret pot plant under a grow-light. You will covet your neighbor’s view.

 

 

…In plain terms: A strolling performance experience under an hour in duration. Reception in the backyard sculpture garden to follow each performance. An artist conversation held in the garden a week after the performance and the artists will self-publish a print zine/catalog with commissioned writings about the work.

As an artist-run space co-directed by a visual artist and a choreographer, HAIR+NAILS Gallery cultivates projects at the intersection of disciplines. In the “off season” the gallerists offer up the storefront and backyard sculpture garden for artist creation residencies. In summer of 2019 they round out their 3rd season of programming with the creation and premiere of JEALOUSY with collaborators Arwen Wilder and Heidi Eckwall.

 

…Funding credit: Arwen Wilder is a fiscal year 2019 recipient of an Artist Initiative grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board. This activity is made possible by the voters of Minnesota through a grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the arts and cultural heritage fund.

 

 

 

 

Artist’s bios:
HIJACK is the Minneapolis-based choreographic collaboration of Kristin Van Loon and Arwen Wilder. Over the last 26 years they have created over 100 dances and performed in venues ranging from proscenium to barely-legal. HIJACK manipulates context by employing a site-specific approach to every performance and toying with audiences’ expectations. HIJACK has performed in New York (at DTW, PS122, HERE ArtCenter, Catch/Movement Research Festival, La Mama, Dixon Place, Chocolate Factory), Japan, Russia, Central America, Ottawa, Chicago, Colorado, New Orleans, Seattle, Philadelphia, San Francisco, at Fuse Box Festival in Austin Texas, and Bates Dance Festival in Maine and Seattle Festival of Dance Improvisation. In 2013, Walker Art Center commissioned “redundant, ready, reading, radish, Red Eye” to celebrate twenty years of HIJACK and Contact Quarterly published the chapbook “Passing for Dance: A HIJACK Reader”.

Heidi Eckwall designs lighting for dance, theater and performance. Sometimes she tours in the US and abroad, sometimes she works and teaches at Colorado College, sometimes she works biking distance from the house she shares with Arwen Wilder and their two children. Recent projects include PUNK100%POP*N!GGA with Nora Chipaumire, Birds of the Future with Charles Campbell and Momentum: New Dance Works  (J. H. Shui Xiān, Herbert Johnson III, Leslie Parker, Jonathan van Arneman).

Ryan Fontaine is a visual artist, musician, and co–director of HAIRandNAILSContemporary Art. Ryan makes paintings, sculptures and multi-media installations using a wide range of materials, synthetic/industrial as well as natural, including living plants. The work is primarily concerned with the relationship between object and information.