2017-2018

Collaboration with dancer/choreographer Eileen Standley

performance, drawing

The piece is constructed as a collaborative duet with choreographer/dancer Eileen Standley and visual artist/drawer Jen Urso. Close Distance has developed throughout diverse urban areas via a series of impromptu public performances. Influenced by the artists’ engagement with the people around them, the work involves complex, present-moment choice-making and gentle, yet specific, awareness of attention to one’s surroundings. The artists consider Close Distance a choreography unfolding in real time. In a broader sense, the project investigates human connection through heightened kinesthetic awareness and responds to the current U.S. political and social environment that emphasizes the sensational and hostile over the subtle and sensitive. As artists who have built their separate practices on the understated, intricate and complex, they believe that this sensibility can be used as a way towards awareness, acceptance and a tenderness in the public realm.