Introducing Ashley Alexandra Wright, Thomas A. Bradley and Konrad Ross; three artists with dance, painting, music composition and garment design expertise.
In intuitive dimensions of flow, the artists are driven by the subversion of their respective conditioning, renegotiating disciplines in search of the unimagined. Setting out to dissolve the void between performer and audience, LANDBREAKERS generates its own genre of storytelling through the exposition of creative effort. By intentionally exposing the audience to this typically hidden part of creation, the vulnerability, struggle, joy, and chaos of art-making is revealed. With sensuality of perception at the fore of the investigation, LANDBREAKERS disassemble the romance of form. They embrace universal histories whilst celebrating a place where escapist fantasies oscillate between absurdity and freedom, dismay and desire.
LANDBREAKERS is performed in public locations such as galleries, museums and urban landscapes as a performative installation lasting for several hours, often over consecutive days. Within this setup, viewers are encouraged to physically invade the space customarily reserved for performance. The intimacy between viewer and performer is critical to the work, as is a shared ‘I don’t know what will happen’ atmosphere. Both viewer and performer bear witness to the will of creation; the viewer merely holds back.
LANDBREAKERS nudges them forward.
As such, the audience may choose their proximity to the performance, up close or at a distance, lingering for its entirety or coming and going at will. They may be provoked into simple or participatory reactions, or enter into a playful dialogue with the performers.
Large, white rolls of paper cover the entirety of the surface of the floor. In a dance of his own, visual artist Konrad Ross attempts to capture fragments of intertwining trajectories and imprints of ‘being’ across the pristine paper. The traces accumulate over several hours, across successive performances to become a perplexity of colour, texture and narrative; metamorphic artworks that archive the experience of performer and viewer into a tangible ‘product'. At the end of the final performance of each location, the artworks thusly created on the paper surfaces are cut into different sizes. Viewers have the option to purchase any of the works created.
The performers wear garments designed and hand-made by Thomas A. Bradley. The garments, as unconventional, existential masses, are ‘up-cycled’ from second-hand clothing and fabric scraps. Their finely placed folds and pleats exaggerate the relation to the body as an organic extension, costume and sculpture. The sound, composed live by Ashley Wright, is compiled of eclectic field recordings, radio interviews, cultural cliches and manipulated pop songs.
LANDBREAKERS strives for an expansion of the social fields of perception; how to think, act and respond in a nuanced manner. It is a call to celebrate that which we know, with a simultaneous, collective allowance for change in the direction of the unfamiliar. In order to greet the unanticipated, not as yet experienced, an environment must be forgiving, but not lawless i.e. anything is an option, but not everything. Ultimately, LANDBREAKERS is permission towards another way of doing, to fundamentally reconsider our individual approach to collective progress.
