Acclaimed performance artist Xavier Cha, currently enjoying a residency at de la Cruz, will be holding auditions during this Saturday's Art Walk. For those courageous enough to try out, we hope you emailed in your headshot - the deadline was February 4. But even if you don't have a time slot, we encourage all to watch this art experience go down.
Cha, who lives and works in NYC, has done some pretty freaking cool projects. She carved her name into hedges in Topiary Tags. In Human Advertisement, she booty danced outside a sushi bar dressed as a shrimp and as a life-size fingernail in front of a nail salon. For Looking Glass, she hired a street dancer to get down with a boom box outside of a gallery exhibiting Jim Drain.
Art critic Jerry Stalz said of her 2006 New York debut: "Strange or
otherwise, Cha effectively combines performance, sculpture, costume
design, installation, cruising the Web for weirdos, happenings, and
humor to make art that is smart, smart-alecky, and even badass." In her
first New York exhibit, the artist sat inside a large cornupia, filled
with fruit and veggies, with her feet sticking out. Outside, another
artist Rachel Mason (who once made a sculpture of herself kissing George
Bush) sang love songs to Cha inside the cornucopia.
Saturday's audition will help Cha find actors, performers, and dancers to
participate in a project slated for later this year. In the past, she's
enlisted actors for a marathon make-out session on a busy Manhattan
street corner and to act as paparazzi obsessed with a phantom subject within a gallery. For the current project, actors must interpret and perform the following three familiar cinematic
gestures while being filmed:
1. The camera is shooting over your shoulder as you stare at your reflection in a mirror
moving through emotions of questioning, doubt, fear, and searching.
2. While the camera is on a circular dolly track, you are standing in the center and slowly turn in a
circle examining the surrounding space feeling deeply disturbed, alienated, confused,
maybe terrified. The space is both familiar and being seen for the first time.
3. Still shot of you looking up to meet the glance of another person. You read and understand their expression, subtly responding with a look of hollow but reserved disappointment.
Come see Miami exhibitionist try out to be booty-dancing shrimp and
human fingernails -or whatever the end result of this endeavor is.
Auditions will take place on Saturday from 7 to 10
p.m. De la Cruz is located at 23 NE 43rd. St. in Miami. Call 305-576-6112
or visit delacruzcollection.org.
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