Sewing Performance Tate Moder
Posted by Tom Estes on Thursday, June 7, 2012 Under: Sewing Performance
Tom Estes in Sewing Performance for The Really, Really Free Market (RRFM), a 3-day market organised as Post-Museum's contribution to No Soul for Sale: A Festival of Independents, held in Tate Modern.
"This sewing performance was intended as a viral extension of a performance created as the culmination of a residency at Trinity Buoy Wharf. The work was conceived in relation to the site of Trinity Buoy Wharf- a place of both extreme poverty and extreme wealth; of crumbling and overgrown Docks, which in recent years have been changed beyond recognition by corporate building and private luxury housing developments. In this work I gently embroider leaves and vines onto a bespoke or tailor- made suit, causing a dimpling of the material. This sewing has the effect of slowly shrivelling the arms and legs of the suit. So in a way the work is really about being powerless in the face of exploitation and is intended to accentuate a core of wordless confusion and emotional dissatisfaction."
Tom Estes
"The Really, Really Free Market (RRFM) movement is a non-hierarchical collective of individuals who form a temporary market based on an alternative gift economy. The RRFM movement aims to counteract capitalism in a non-reactionary way. It holds as a major goal to build a community based on sharing resources, caring for one another and improving the collective lives of all." The event at Tate Modern was organised by Ela Ciecierska, Emma Jackson, Lynn Lu in collaboration with the people of London.
Post-Museum is an independent cultural and social space in Singapore, run as an open platform for examining contemporary life, promoting the arts and connecting people. Opened September 2007, Post-Museum is a ground-up project initiated by Singaporean curatorial team which includes: Bala Matchap, Gene D'Castro, Jolyn Chin, Veron Lau, KK Lee, Phua Xinyan, Eve Tan, Ted Tan, Tay Shi Ying, Woon Tien Wei.
No Soul for Sale: A Festival of Independents
"I am delighted to be able to celebrate some of our local partnerships as part of the No Soul for Sale birthday weekend. As we now work on the Transforming Tate Modern development, these partnerships with the community will continue to create a foundation for work with all our audiences."
Sir Nicholas Serota, Director of Tate
For more information go to:
http://
www.post-museum.org
You can also see some information on the origional perfomance at: http://
Many Thanks to RRFM for allowing me to take part in their event. Please check out their website at:
http://
In : Sewing Performance
As an artist I have always leaned toward making Live Art performance work that is participatory or immersive in some way. In my Live Art performance I stage an 'action' and then ask members of the audience to take pictures on a communal camera. In this way, the audience becomes part of the performance, and the pictures are then posted on on-line social networking sites and web sites for another, wider on-line audience.
For me, fantasy and illusion are not contradictions of reality, but instead an integral part of our everyday lives. There is a real Peter Pan Syndrome at play in my work and I suppose I would consider myself to be a carnival sideshow conceptualist, combining a bare-bones formal conceptualism with an eternally adolescent, prank DIY comic-approach.
At the core of this work is an attention to the flickering, fading definition of our lives as dictated by the computer monitor and the rapid reply of instant messaging. I strive, not to break down these introverted, often self-imposed boundaries, but to look at how dataflow from the virtual realm impacts on the significance and symbolism of real-world human senses. But in doing so, I have begun to generate unexpected questions about how art might be able to inscribe itself on the surface of reality- not to represent itself on the surface of reality –not to represent reality, nor to duplicate it, but to replace it.
