December 17, 2017, 7 - 9 PM
167 Canal Street, New York (map)
MX is pleased to present Spoiled Shell, a new performance by Whitney Vangrin, featuring Aaron Ricks and musical accompaniment by Sophie Leetmaa.
The chest breaks away from the body and morphs into a molded piece of chest-shaped platemale. The skin is peeled back and molts to make room for future growth, all this to dissuade the next parasite. Wholeness is the one compromised; the piece is the source of recovery.
The desire to shed one’s organs satisfies a fantasy of purification — seeking redemption and rejuvenation. The body, if considered a shell decaying, can be renewed by the melting of organic parts to insure artificial reconstitution. Natural components fracture, shed their tissues and skins, and become something else.
As an alchemical ritual, the performance will show the reciprocal relationship of fragmentations and reconstitutions as cycles of renewal, using practical effects of rendering 'doubles' of the body, made in plastic, wax and gelatin. Simultaneously, close-up images from a live-stream will accentuate the body as it continues to be fragmented. The ritual embraces the ambiguities that exist between being and wanting to be, agitating the production of a synthetic myth. This blurs the lines between flesh and gelatin, welding human flesh to its inorganic counterpart; each part of the body telling its own history of loss.