BEGAUZE is an informance exploring Sherry Erskine and Bonnie Sue Stein’s collaborative interdisciplinary arts practice in performance, video and installation. Their screening and talk is a direct response to the resurrection of their ½ inch open reel video series, Gauze in the Bowl created in 1978. In September 2015, they created a prototype ‘performance with video documented to video’ in Newtown Castle, County Clare, Ireland utilizing Gauze in the Bowl. The resulting digital video Gauze in the Castle, a layered self-portrait spanning forty years, will be displayed with an original percussive soundtrack. The event will also include Ode to Bachelard, 2016, an installation incorporating video projection on sculpture. These works explore place and memory in terms of human interaction and the symbolic function of architectural spaces including a vacant bowling alley, a castle chamber and the form of a house. Erskine and Stein will discuss the theoretical contexts of their work – Jungian archetypes, Gaston Bachelard’s Poetics of Space, and the Japanese NOH Theatre spatial concept known as “MA” (“nothingness”). Erskine and Stein recently exhibited The Gauze Series: 1978-2015, at La MaMa Galleria in New York City.

Co-organized with Vi PER Gallery, Prague and GOH Productions, New York: http://gohproductions.org/  Image: Mark Krastof and Sherry Erskine