Visual Arts Program Lecturer Pia Lindman (SM Visual Studies 1999), is one of 14 artists included in White Box's "Under Your Skin," a group show on Finnish art in New York City. The exhibition looks at Finnish artists who work both in and outside Finland, underscoring the global nature of Finnish art. Lindman's works, titled "CORPCOMM: Enactments and Improvisations in Corporate Communities," examines how identity is expressed by human gestures, incorporating a series of performances and drawings she created with employees at the Global Consulting Group Corp. in Manhattan. The employees, ranging from receptionists to CEOs, directed Lindman as she enacted the physical gestures that best expressed their daily office routines. From stills of the gestures, captured on video, Lindman made corresponding pencil drawings. An opening reception will be held at the White Box Annex (601 W. 26th St., 14th Floor) on Saturday, April 2, from 6-8 p.m. and the show will be on view through April 23.
"The Funambulist and the Two-Year Old," an exhibition by Assistant Professor Wendy Jacob, a Mary I. Bunting Institute Fellow in sculpture at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, will open with a talk by the artist on Monday, April 4, at 4 p.m. in the Living Room of the Cronkhite Graduate Center at Harvard University. Jacob's sculptural works investigate the practical and intimate relationships between architecture and animate bodies. For this project, she plans to complete a house scaled for a toddler and, in collaboration with a high-wire artist, build a working model for a system of overhead paths that would thread between and through city buildings. Through experimentation with environments close to the ground--or well above it--Jacob aims to create new places for the specific and eccentric body to inhabit. The exhibit is on view at Baker Room of Agassiz House in Radcliffe Yard through Friday, April 22.
Associate Professor Thomas DeFrantz made the "Best of the New: Ideas" list compiled by Boston Globe Magazine for "Moves Across the Water: Tap and Hip-Hop,"a long-distance (via video conference) dance event with Patrick Loo at the National University of Singapore last September. "The Singapore-MIT Alliance was experimenting with a futuristic connection that reduces lag time in sending to less than a second, so dancers can move nearly in synch if not cheek to cheek," said the Globe.
"N," Laura Harrington's tragicomedy about Napolean's exile on St. Helena, took another step on its road to fruition with a pair of staged readings by Pilgrim Theatre Research and Performance Collaborative over spring break: at Harvard University's Adams House Pool and at the Boston Center for the Arts' Calderwood Pavilion. Written by Harrington and directed by Pilgrim Artistic Director Kim Mancuso, both lecturers in the MIT Theater Arts Section, the play was presented as part of the 2005 "Crossing Borders II" Festival. Pilgrim plans a work-in-progress production of "N" in June, a premiere of the finished work in Boston in September/October and a production at New York City's La MaMa Experimental Theater Club in October
A version of this article appeared in MIT Tech Talk on March 30, 2005 (download PDF).
