ArtDeadline.Com E.P.A (Environmental Performance Actions)

New York, New York - E.P.A. (Environmental Performance Actions) is a group exhibition surveying recent performance works that take as their cues the spontaneous situations and intermedia of the Happenings and Fluxus movements, and the impassioned energy of environmental activism. Environmental performance actions began in the 1960s when artists, responding to a host of environmental crises and concerns, began organizing both guerilla actions and planned performances to draw attention to those issues and suggest solutions. The legacy of those pioneering artists, like Joseph Beuys, Hans Haacke, Alan Sonfist and Agnes Denes, inspired a second, and now a third, generation of artists to explore the interstice of humans and nature.

The documentation of their activities, performed mostly outdoors with a limited audience, has evolved with technological innovations in photography and video, allowing a larger audience to engage in the dialogue created from these artists’ actions. E.P.A. inc ludes a range of ephemera, artifacts and documentation from thirty recent actions. The works range from theatrical to documentary and capture the multifarious strategies that artists are using to address issues such as climate change, watersheds, urbanization and, ultimately, human survival.

E.P.A. is the first project of S.E.A. (Social-Environmental Aesthetics), an exhibition program and archive of artworks that address social and environmental concerns. It will assemble artists, activists, scientists and scholars to address these issues through presentations of visual art, performances, panels and lecture series. Central to the mission of S.E.A. is to provide a vehicle through which the public can be made aware of this kind of work, to provide a forum for collaboration between artists and ecologists and to inspire them to continue the tradition of work that S.E.A. presents. The S.E.A. Archive will be a permanent catalog of information, images and videos that will be a searchable database for scholars and researchers. S.E.A., E.P.A., and all future projects will occupy a permanent space in Exit Underground, a multimedia performance, film, and exhibition venue underneath Exit Art’s main
gallery space.

Artists: Brandon Ballengée, Vaughn Bell/Sarah Kavage/Nicole Kistler, Mark Brest van Kempen, Carissa Carman/ Joanna Lake, The Center for Tactical Magic, Susanne Cockrell/Ted Purves, Xavier Cortada, Carrie Dashow/Jesse Pearlman Karlsberg, Erica Fielder, Ozzie Forbes, Futurefarmers, Fritz Haeg, Amy Howden-Chapman, Basia Irland, Scot Kaplan, Carolyn Lambert, Robin Lasser, Kathryn Miller, Miss Rockaway Armada, Matthew Moore, Eve S. Mosher, EcoArtTech: Cary Peppermint/Christine Nadir, Andrea Polli and Joe Gimore with Dr. Patrick Market, Rapid Response (Cobb/Fend/Fischer/Meyer), Agents of Change Project Leader James Reed and Social Sculpture Research Unit/Earth Agenda Projects, Austin Shull, Brooke Singer/Brian Rigney Hubbard, Anne-Katrin Spiess, Chris Sollars

This project was curated by Exit Art, ecoartspace curator Amy Lipton, and founder/co-curator Patricia Watts. The S.E.A. initiative and E.P.A. exhibition were conceived by Papo Colo and Jeanette Ingberman

General Information

Dates: March 25-may 3, 2008
Fees: $5 donation
Target Audience: General Audience
Time: Tues-Thurs, 10–6 pm; Friday, 10– 8 pm; Sat, noon–8 pm

Venue Details

Exit Art
475 Tenth Avenue
New York, NY 10018
ph: 212-966-7745

Image shown: Brandon Ballengée, Malamp UK, 2008