the destroyer > art > Michael Anthony GarcÍa
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If At First is a performance I debuted in Dallas on August 16, 2014 at (wo)manorial 's live performance showcase, curated by PERFORMANCESW. For this performance, I circulated through crowds of people, tagging them with lettered stickers. Other participants were then encouraged to text me their first impressions of them using the letters as identifiers. These first impressions were then written on labels and adhered to the individuals who "gave off" those impressions. This social exercise was created to facilitate participants' realizations of others perceptions of them versus how they perceive themselves. Steeping Stone, on the other hand, is an abstracted exploration into the latent desires of the artistic mind. Reaching to the beginnings of creative thought and its eventual evolution; the ideas and imagery in this work are one part psychological rendering, one part confessional, and one part resignation. It is a dichotomy of the guttural and analytical mind told through sculpture, dance, music, and text. As I prepared to enter my fourth decade of life, I turned back to examine the path I had followed, appropriating images and ideas from my past, to explore them within a newer context. The evolutionary chart of my gender associations, from feminine to masculine, lay splayed in a public forum—dissected and animated for public consumption. Even our solid core, laid steeping for decades, erodes, dissolves, settles and metamorphoses into something less solid, but just as potent. :: :: :: Michael Anthony García is an Austin-based, independent curator and multi-discipliary artist whose practice predominantly focuses on found-object sculpture, installation and performance. He is co-founder of the Los Outsiders collective, had work in the 2011 Texas Biennial and has won awards both for his curatorial and sculptural/installation work. |
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| If At First, Performance, Photo documentation by Chris Hamid Moezzi, 2014 | |
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| If At First, Performance, Photo documentation by Chris Hamid Moezzi, 2014 | |
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| If At First, Performance, Photo documentation by Chris Hamid Moezzi, 2014 | |
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| If At First, Performance, Photo documentation by Chris Hamid Moezzi, 2014 | |
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| If At First, Performance, Photo documentation by Chris Hamid Moezzi, 2014 | |
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| Steeping Stone, Performance, 2014 (Click image to view.) |