Anastasia Ax: The World As Of Yesterday

About

In The World As Of Yesterday, Anastasia uses her body and black ink to stage a live intervention with compressed shredded paper bales.  During Act I of the performance on Friday, September 11, she will wreck solid bales of paper in an explosive action, letting the hidden stories and cultural traces in the printed matter, in this case leftovers from the local community, unfold and create new stories and meaning. As she destroys compressed, neatly packed shredded paper cubes made up of newspapers, advertisements, personal data, official documents and splatters black ink over the debris - all in front of live audience, the paper's original purposes are lost to the largest possible degree while the half-life of its social re-packaging remains intact.  

The role of ink in these activities is double-edged. It belongs to the world of drawing, the physical act of filling out white spaces, but the black ink has an element of poison and bile, melancholy and destruction as well. The raw energies connected with the splashing, the spitting out, the havoc, transform time from linear dimensions into circular moments. New thoughts and new communions take shape through the unpredictable openness of the situation.

Act I of Anastasia's performance will be accompanied by an improvised sound dialogue with C. Spencer Yeh - a multi-media artist, improviser and composer who will use a mixture of amplified sound elements to respond to and drive Ax˙s audio physical performance.

During Act II on Saturday, September 12, Anastasia will interact with debris left from her previous day performance. She will be at the gallery sampling, repurposing and transforming the relics of her perfomance into new improvised objects and spatial installations which will remain on view until October 24. The owners of these newly created works will have the possibility and the right to open them up whenever they desire, with the only request from the artist to document the transformation and send a photo back to her. In this way the documentation will be part of her personal archive and a beginning of a new project. 

At the end of her show, if the piece has not been turned into an object of qualified acquisition and ownership, the final destroying destination will be back at the recycling factory ready to take on another life and continue the cycle.