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Performance by Ben Durham and Robert Beatty
November 18, 2014 @ 6:30 pm - 8:30 pm
Free and open to the public
Join 21c Louisville for a special performance by artists Ben Durham and Robert Beatty, inspired by Durham’s text portraits. Using handmade paper, Durham creates portraits from the criminal records of friends and acquaintances, transforming these images into poetic and poignant reflections on identity and storytelling. Working with cassette tape recordings of Ben Durham dictating the text from his portraits, Robert Beatty will create a live-processed sound improvisation while Durham recites the text in front of the audience. Beatty’s extensive manipulation of the tape and treatment of the recorded voice as pure sound re-imagines how we transmit and receive information and what we lose in the process. Just as Durham’s Text Portraits are constructed layer upon layer out of written text, the artist’s voice becomes buried under its own sound, creating an experience where narrative is examined yet obscured.
About the artists:
Ben Durham’s work has been exhibited in institutions such as the National Portrait Gallery in Washington DC, 21c Museum in Louisville, KY, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond, VA, and Flag Art Foundation in New York, NY and in solo exhibitions at Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery, New York, NY and Marc Selwyn Fine Art, Los Angeles, CA, among others. His work is in many private and public collections, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, NY, the Hammer Museum, CA, and the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. Durham lives and works in Richmond, VA.
Robert Beatty is an artist and musician based in Lexington, Kentucky. Beatty performs music as Three Legged Race and is a founding member of the noise band Hair Police, as well as a frequent collaborator with artists as diverse as Takeshi Murata, C. Spencer Yeh and Robert Schneider of Apples in Stereo. He has exhibited at Institute 193, Lexington, Land of Tomorrow, Louisville, and has been in group shows in Baltimore and Los Angeles. Beatty has performed at the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing; Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin; The Gene Siskel Film Center at the Art Institute of Chicago; the Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati; and in New York at the New Museum, Deitch Projects, Issue Project Room, Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery, and Canada Gallery.
