Chelsea Knight and Martine Syms
Hosted by The Shandaken Project and Storm King Art Center
New Windsor, NY

Sunday September 6th, 2015, 3pm-evening

The Center for Experimental Lectures invites you to join us sixty minutes north of New York City for our fourth annual Labor Day weekend event hosted by the Shandaken Project, for new lecture-performances by Chelsea Knight and Martine Syms. The day’s program will begin at Storm King Art Center at 3pm, and continue into the evening on the contiguous campus of The Shandaken Project at Storm King.

Chelsea Knight will present an experimental walking tour of Storm King beginning at the Visitor Center at 3pm. What Is a Document? will reconfigure the sculpture park’s objects and surroundings, slipping them away from their official histories and engaging alternative approaches to their origins. Produced from research undertaken during Knight’s time as a resident at the Shandaken Project this summer, What Is a Document? will commingle improvised fictions with recorded histories. She asks: what are fixed things, words, memories, and desires? How does a new idea, proposition or belief become a tautology? What happens when we establish legitimacy for a thing, then allow that legitimacy to collapse? The piece forms a one-thing-leads-to-the-next narrative that will inevitably wind away from the objects in the park as the audience walks among them.

Audience members are then invited to enjoy self-directed tours of the sculpture park, and reconvene on the grounds of The Shandaken Project at Storm King, which are contiguous to the sculpture park, at 6pm.

After the program by Adult Contemporary and a BYO-BBQ, Martine Syms will present Misdirected Kiss, which she describes as follows: “I’ve been researching a set of gestures first studied by John Bulwer in 1644. I came across Bulwer’s texts Chirologia and Chironomia while looking for information about acting techniques. I was thinking about the similarities and differences between real movements and movements made for camera. I started comparing Bulwer’s index to YouTube videos and animated GIFs featuring black women. How did I learn to move? I modeled myself after the women in my family, celebrities, and public figures. I had learned by looking, by being a witness. These images had accumulated in my body.”