AUGUST 1 & 2 - BRAINFREEZE & LIVE DINING

AUGUST 1 Friday @ 8pm BRAINFREEZE
a video performance installation by PHYLLIS BULKIN LEHRER

Le Petit Versailles
346 East Houston Street. between avenue b + c.
F/V train to Second Ave. J/M - Delancey Street

cool off & have fun!
Brainfreeze is an evening length experimental projection installation by Phyllis Bulkin Lehrer at La Petite Versailles that seeks to explore a sense of place, using live and pre-recorded moving imagery to create an immersive video environment . Presented in the hot summer garden, this sensual projected world will contain moving media and sound with a wintery sensibility that will ( part of the experiment) simulate cool feeling. There will be a camera (operated by Ashley Lehrer) producing a live feed so that audience participants and elements of the garden itself can be textured on to the 3d animated images that inhabit the projection .These snow inspired objects will be will be mobile in real time within the projection .
A Dancer/performer ( Jorhari Mayfield) will navigate the space wearing a costume with portable lcd screens . The performer will interact with the audience during the installation. The contrast of imagery will be on various levels ; larger than life projection in the space, projection of real time textures onto the 3d projection elements and the miniaturized confrontation of the imagery on the small dvd players worn by the performer.

LIVE DINING by Nicole Fournier
A performance installation of cooking & dining and a lively discussion on sustainable communities, guerilla gardening and more. Copies of the recently published book
On Guerilla Gardening will be available courtesy of Bloomsbury.

August 2 Saturday 6 –11pm FREE


Since 1988, my art practice is informed by environmental concerns, ecology and the interrelationships between personal, social, community and environmental connections. This has taking form in painting, sound-light-body installation-performance, collage, creating assemblage sculpture with food (fresh & decomposing), hair and other materials, and has been expressed through conceptual and ephemeral art forms, intervention, installation & performance, using plants, earth, roots and used objects, and using digital imagery, video and projections. Since 1999 I began doing independent research into alternative food growing systems.
Since 2002, my main focus is performance, addressing systems of food production and land usages, in relation to the body and gender. This was expressed through the Performances in 2002, “Nipple Hair and Weedeater”, about cutting growth, control, wildness and connections, and well-known “Corn Field Performances”, which consisted of various manoeuvres in a Genetically Modified monoculture cornfield, in rural Quebec. Having a need to go more in depth into interdisciplinary issues related to the environment, I embarked on an interdisciplinary post-graduate Diploma in Environmental Studies (Arts & Science) at McGill University, which I completed in 2005.

While I continue to perform indoors in galleries, other venues and outdoors in public contexts, since 2004 my performances have included works that embrace a relational, participatory aesthetic that invites public collaboration, such as “Live Dining”, a performance, intervention, ephemeral installation, which is an adaptable concept, site specific work, which involves bringing meaning to performing the intimate actions of, sharing, planting, harvesting, foraging, preparing, cooking & dining, all done where a diversity of edible and non-edible plants grow, in an integrated “dining room-kitchen” installation. Food is free, and all are invited. Since 2005, “Live Dining’s" activist quality, is also about subverting the idea of garden, replacing it with or bringing meaning to wild plants and polyculture agriculture in suburban and urban areas. It does, as Tagny Duff has noted, “reference earlier land art movements and, in this case, earlier Fluxus works that often employed the ritual of eating and food. All these works explicitly use collaborative working networks in order to create the work.” http://visualeyez2007.blogspot.com/2007/05/live-dining-nicole-fournier.html
In 2007 “Live Dining” was performed 5 times internationally and nationally. In 2007, the new performance “The Blinding Light of Death and Cooking the Earth” was performed in Italy and Boston, USA; this performance was inspired and relates to “Nipple Hair and Weedeater” and “Corn Field Performances”, with the beginning rant of “I need to Control” and the continuation of using elements such as the drill, weedeater and cutting hair, including nipple hair.

LPV events are made possible by Allied Productions, Inc.,
Citizens for NYC, Green Thumb/NYC Dept. of Parks, Materials for the Arts;
NYC Dept. of Cultural Affairs, NYC Dept. of Sanitation & NYC Board of Education
Film & Exhibition support from The New York State Council on the Arts, a state agency.
Additional support, in part, by public funds from the NYC Department of Cultural Affairs