Tuesday Evening Recap of Friday Night Lights & Sunday Afternoons.

Alison Owen's House Rules

Thanks to all who came out this weekend, especially those who came for the whole shebang - Friday night and Sunday afternoon.

Friday started off with Maya Gurantz's Floormap: Seduction, a self guided dance on our temporarily erected dance floor and ended with Liza Wade Green's full blown dance party - part of Hill House Mine - on the very same floor.

As the sun set, we soaked in Endurance Performance Proposition (Fade to Black, Sunset / Denoument) by Maya Gurantz.



Endurance Performance Proposition (Fade to Black, Sunset / Denoument) by Maya Gurantz

 We lounged on beanbag chairs with magazines and tequila shots while watching CamLab's Under the Blanet, a live feed performance from bedroom to Goatspace.

Summercampers watching CamLab's Under the Blanet

Sunday was a different affair. . . we traded the cool evening of Friday Night Lights for the warmth and sunshine of an afternoon on the hillside.  Marcus Durkheim treats us with a careful installation of paintings and repaintings in Goatspace.  Michael Carter's Appetite for Destruction tempted and repelled people with champagne and a roasted suckling pig. Suzanne Fontaine spent the afternoon interacting with guests using cellphones, string and forces in A New Kind of Fortune Telling while Erin Payne's Memory Lane for Langerstroemia gives the Crape Myrtle tree a chance to see itself for the first time in it's native setting.  Matt Wardell and his rolling melon lead us down the hill with his "longish and flattish site specific installation" entitled Fig to Pataya (Ramp). Greeting us at the bottom of the hill is Aili Schmeltz's Tailings. 

Fig to Pataya (Ramp) by Matt Wardell

Tailings by Aili Schmeltz

Appetite for Destruction by Michael Carter

Erin Payne's Memory Lane for Lagerstroemia

A New Kind of Fortune Telling by Suzanne Fontaine

Is this not four paintings by Marcus Durkheim?

Alison Owen's solo show, House Rules in Guestroom adds and intertwines old and new elements to the house and it's story with repeated patterns and built succulents. And as on Friday night, we closed out the evening with Hill House Mine, a dance/theatre performance written and directed by Liza Wade Green with traveling audience members moving about the house with beer, champagne, cookies...oh, and swedish fish. 

Liza Wade Green's Hill House Mine Finale with Steven Wendt, Liza Wade Green, Janice Gomez, David Gochfeld, Yanghee Lee and Andrew Thacher

 (Photo by Devon Tsuno)

Many thanks and shoutouts to Technical Director of Hill House Mine and usher, Danny Green; Intern and usher, Sean Tan; usher and huge supporter Tom Norris; beat giving & fist pumping inducing DJ Legion; Ryan Taber's gift of a birdhouse and its silent role; our neighbors for their patience and attendance; and to John & Dan Kaelin for coming to see their old home.  

For more pictures from the shows, check out our *new* flickr site here!

Upcoming 2Day-Extravaganza

Press Release Friday Night Lights & Sunday Afternoons

Friday Night Lights Performances, August 19th 7-9:30PM
CamLab
Maya Gurantz
HILL HOUSE MINE  by Liza Wade Green starts promptly at 8:45PM (audience travels through the house)

Sunday Afternoons August 21- September 4
Opening Reception, August 21st 5-8PM
Michael Carter
Marcus Durkheim
Suzanne Fontaine
Erin Payne
Aili Schmeltz
Matt Wardell
and in Guestroom Alison Owen

HILL HOUSE MINE  7:45-9PM
performance starts promptly at 7:45PM

Hours by appointment. Please contact summercampprojectproject@gmail.com.

Summercamp's ProjectProject presents Friday Night Lights & Sunday Afternoons- evening of three performances and a daytime outdoor group exhibition of artists who work within the realms of exploring the unknown. Both events will feature a performance by Liza Wade Green, written during her Fall 2010 Residency at Summercamp.

Friday night:
CamLab, a collaborative project between Anna Mayer and Jemima Wyman, will start things off with a durational performance using a soft relational object in one of the bedroom's at Summercamp. All of their activities and investigations to forge intimacy "Under the Blanket" will be seen via a live feed on a monitor downstairs in Goatspace.

CamLab’s investment in the body is supplemented by an investigation into the interrelatedness of language and embodiment. Some performances use language exclusively while others depend on non-verbal exchanges. CamLab believes that a contemporary politics of pleasure must acknowledge the contiguity of language and body in facilitating the spectrum of experience between alterity and intimacy.

Likewise, Maya Gurantz deals with social issues by working in video, performance, theater, installation and community-generated projects. Gurantz’s work uses rigorously physical and playful theatricality to expose the dark histories and painful contradictions embedded in performances of power.

To end the evening, Liza Wade Green's HILL HOUSE MINE is a dance/theatre work created specifically for the midcentury modern home that hosts Summercamp’s ProjectProject. Part haunted house, part live installation, HILL HOUSE MINE takes the audience on a journey through five rooms and the backyard of the residence and explores a world where the fantasies of childhood become truth and the realities of loss are buried.  The story follows a family coping with two tragic deaths.  As the audience travels through the house they meet different family members and piece together a puzzle of death, dance, memory, and time.

The site-specific work is written and choreographed by Brooklyn-based theatre artist Liza Wade Green in collaboration with six performers from New York and Los Angeles. The performers use movement and text to bring the characters to life as they connect to the house’s architectural details.  Hidden passageways, plastic-covered furniture, an expansive sloping yard, and a claw foot tub all add to the eerie backdrop for this interactive experience.  Brick and mortar give way to the home’s memories and dreams, while the performers awaken its ghosts and rumors – all giving voice to a family in transition.

Because the the audience travels through the house Hill House Mine  starts promptly at 8:45.


Sunday Afternoon:
At the bottom of the hill, Erin Payne makes visible a botanical journey that is often not considered. Payne will visually represent the ancestral home of our Crape Myrtle tree as a painted curved backdrop of tree’s landscape of origin in China. Payne explores anthropomorphic ideas of nature examining itself through human constructs by using a tall mirror allowing the tree to view itself within its native landscape. From the bottom of the hill to the top, Matt Wardell's construction of wood, fabric, found and constructed elements traverses the length of Summercamp's hill. Maybe a cantaloupe will be involved, but its hard to say.

Also near the base of the hill, Suzanne Fontaine will hold A NEW KIND OF FORTUNE TELLING*. This interactive experience
seeking understanding
of destiny
and self.
*Readings limited to one per person.

Aili Schmeltz's Tomorrowland  explores the idea that utopia can be considered not only a place or a goal, but also as the very act of striving for such a target. These hybridized structures are materializations, remnants of an ideal that never was and may never be. As fallen monuments to a utopic philosophy, they function as relics of both a “good place” and “no place.” They nod towards a bright future and a fallen past, recontextualizing and recombining materials that are both nostalgic and futuristic. An embedded sense of naiveté is inherent to the objects, formed from a chemical bond of sunshine and noir that was repeatedly cooled and heated by urban temperament and artifice. Part architectural, part fossil, part potential: these works utilize discarded building materials that appear to have crystallized within a ‘natural’ process—strata that have undergone philosophical transformation yet to be fulfilled. Michael Carter's Appetite for Destruction, also explores the role of ideology, but in social practice.  By investigating the embedded but often overlooked content of the ubiquitous reception table, Carter will stage an encounter where the expectations of interaction are unknown and uncertain. Carter poses the question:  Do the ideological assumptions of contemporary social practice actually limit the goal of individual empowerment?  Ultimately, does power only grow out of the -metaphorical or actual - barrel of a gun?

In parallel, the illusive nature of physical reality and how our beliefs and preconceived ideas prejudice our responses to everything around us fascinates Marcus Durkheim. Objects become extensions of the self and only gain meaning by the associations we attach to them through experience, memories and emotions. A cupcake may remind one person about a wonderful experience, while another may be triggered to relive a trauma, and yet, another has no connection to cup cakes whatsoever. The objects in our life can reflect who we are, what we think and feel: inert avatars, ambassadors of self. "Things are not what they appear to be: nor are they otherwise."  Surangama Sutra

For the solo show in Guestroom, Alison Owen has constructed House Rules. Owen studied the facts of the house- its narrative history, the materials and patterns found in it, the specific movement of the light across the walls. By tracking this data Owen hopes to discover part of the intangible nature of the space. Intrigued by the house’s history, 3119 Chadwick is not a static place. Owen imagined it sending out tendrils like a grapevine, expanding, covering over old bits, breaking off into new rooms and new hiding places, like the labyrinthine house in Bruno Schulz’s book “The Street of Crocodiles”. Owen's composition is an attempt to create a new and logical offshoot of the house, arrested mid-growth.

And again, to end the evening, Liza Wade Green's HILL HOUSE MINE. Because the the audience travels through the house Hill House Mine  starts promptly at 7:45.