Eskasizer by chameckilerner

About

The BOILER / PIEROGI is proud to present Eskasizer, a video installation by chameckilerner with viewing sessions and an opening reception on Friday, February 26, 2016. There will be two viewing sessions: the first at 6pm, the second at 6:30pm, each lasting nearly 18 minutes. These will be followed by an opening reception from 7-9pm.

Who does not remember the 1950’s Eskasizer belt machine, one of the first electric machines that promised to firm our bodies? Its advertising presented us with the beautiful mother in the basement, massaging her waist in the hope of toning the undeniable erosion of her aging body.

In their new video installation Eskasizer, chameckilerner (a collaboration between the artists Andrea Lerner and Rosane Chamecki) present four women, each with a different body shape, age, and background. They move in repetitive, and yet, unpredictable ways, reflecting the constant propulsion of the machine that manipulates their bodies.

The work is a collection of extreme slow motion takes, in which the camera is zoomed in to the point that the women’s identity gradually blurs into abstraction. Their bodies are not acting on their own impulses and desires. Instead, they are passive – with their hips, knees, and legs yielding to the external forces. The belt vibrates each body, morphing it into a landscape of moving flesh, the movement organic despite its source.

A sense of strangeness is present in the movement seen on the videos, which is simultaneously visceral and foreign. Can we expect these bodies to emerge with their own unique luminosity, texture, and weight? Do they maintain any vitality? Is there still sentience in these bodies?

In this installation, four large screens form a room-like space with the audience seated at the center. Unfolding over nearly eighteen minutes, Eskasizertransforms the body into a singular landscape and a meditative, subversive experience of the flesh.

Directed by: chameckilerner

Music: Josephine Wiggs
Director of Photography: Frank Stanley
Producer: Tanja Meding
Performed by Gabri Christa, Hillary Clark, Jennifer Kjos, Sally Rhodes

Eskasizer was commissioned and supported via a production residency by EMPAC I Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY.

chameckilerner is a 20-year collaboration between Rosane Chamecki and Andrea Lerner. As Andre Lepecki wrote as early as 1993, at Tanz Actuelle when he first saw their work: “it is important to understand the choreographic reformulation proposed this season by choreographers Andrea Lerner and Rosane Chamecki … the will to break a tradition that by now suffocates the dance.”

Over 20 years, chameckilerner has created a body of work that has developed from dance performances, to video and installations. chameckilerner choreographed 12 full evening piece in addition to 7 commissioned works for other companies. Their work has been presented in the US by The Kitchen, DTW, The Joyce Theater, Performance Space 122, Central Park SummerStage, Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, Mass MoCA, Diverseworks , Jacob’s Pillow, American Dance Festival, among others. chameckilerner has toured extensively throughout Brazil as well as Canada, Venezuela, Portugal, The Netherlands, UK, Austria, Germany, Denmark, Finland, Colombia, Costa Rica, El Salvador, and Romania.

chameckilerner is the recipient of various fellowships and grants including the prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship in 2008, The Foundation for Contemporary Arts, NYFA, NYSCA, Jerome Foundation, Rockefeller Map Funds, Siemens, among others; and is featured in the 2014/Spring issue of BOMB Magazine, in a ten page interview with Eve Sussman.