Sophia Cleary, Chris Domenick, Alhena Katsof

<p>Sophia Cleary, Chris Domenick, Alhena Katsof<br /> Hosted by The Shandaken Project<br /> Shandaken, NY</p> <p>Saturday August 31, 2013 7pm</p> <p>The Center for Experimental Lectures invites you to join us upstate for our annual Labor Day weekend event at The Shandaken Project for new lecture-performances by Sophia Cleary, Chris Domenick, and Alhena Katsof. Guests are welcome any time in the afternoon and to stay on after the lectures into the night or overnight for eating, drinking, and camping.</p> <p>Alhena’s presentation, provisionally titled “The Garden Is Overgrown”, will explore gardens and woodlands as an enchanted, darkly mnemonic device. Burials of various kinds and the occasional zebra crossing take place as we meander through stories of fantastical cultivation. Wrapped around poems, paintings and post-socialist sculpture graveyards, the garden is overgrown with plants, herbs, flowers and weeds. As Giacomo Leopoldi says, “Everywhere you look, you will find pain”. We will visit with supremely accomplished as well as accidental gardeners, propagators, clodhoppers, and gleaners, both real and imaginary, including Medlar Lucan and Durian Gray, Hannah Höch and Vita Sackville-West among numerous others.</p> <p>Chris Domenick’s presentation, entitled “Two and Monuments,” will address topology and the complexities and difficulties of site-specificity. Focused on instances in which monuments are constructed for a site and subsequently severed from their place and rendered homeless, Chris’ presentation will explore the possibilities of these nomadic objects. Might there be a place for language to go once it is displaced from its context? Where do we find these semantic refugee camps? Chris will construct a metaphoric, linguistic, and actual map of signs that require us to understand the psychic as their primary site.</p> <p>Sophia Cleary’s presentation, tentatively titled “I want to be inside you Part II”, will investigate masks, breath, organs, terrorism, balancing, urns, graves, dominance and love. By assaulting the act of oration with dance, Sophia hopes to conjure a performance that makes space for an unusual emotional texture that won’t be able to exist until the audience arrives. Sophia is a resident at The Shandaken Project this summer and will be developing her talk during her stay.</p>