chameckilerner
Eskasizer
Video installation
26 February – 3 April, 2016
Opening: 26 Feb. 6-9pm
The Boiler will be open until 8pm Saturday, 2 April
Press Release
The BOILER / PIEROGI is proud to present Eskasizer, a video installation by chameckilerner with viewing sessions and an opening reception on Friday, February 26, 2016. There will be two viewing sessions: the first at 6pm, the second at 6:30pm, each lasting nearly 18 minutes. These will be followed by an opening reception from 7-9pm.
Who does not remember the 1950’s Eskasizer belt machine, one of the first electric machines that promised to firm our bodies? Its advertising presented us with the beautiful mother in the basement, massaging her waist in the hope of toning the undeniable erosion of her aging body.
In their new video installation Eskasizer, chameckilerner (a collaboration between the artists Andrea Lerner and Rosane Chamecki) present four women, each with a different body shape, age, and background. They move in repetitive, and yet, unpredictable ways, reflecting the constant propulsion of the machine that manipulates their bodies.
The work is a collection of extreme slow motion takes, in which the camera is zoomed in to the point that the women’s identity gradually blurs into abstraction. Their bodies are not acting on their own impulses and desires. Instead, they are passive – with their hips, knees, and legs yielding to the external forces. The belt vibrates each body, morphing it into a landscape of moving flesh, the movement organic despite its source.
A sense of strangeness is present in the movement seen on the videos, which is simultaneously visceral and foreign. Can we expect these bodies to emerge with their own unique luminosity, texture, and weight? Do they maintain any vitality? Is there still sentience in these bodies?
In this installation, four large screens form a room-like space with the audience seated at the center. Unfolding over nearly eighteen minutes, Eskasizer transforms the body into a singular landscape and a meditative, subversive experience of the flesh.
Directed by: chameckilerner
Music: Josephine Wiggs
Director of Photography: Frank Stanley
Producer: Tanja Meding
Performed by Gabri Christa, Hillary Clark, Jennifer Kjos, Sally Rhodes
Eskasizer was commissioned and supported via a production residency by EMPAC I Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY.
Music for Eskasizer by Josephine Wiggs. The soundscapes for each of the four films are auditory expressions of the minutely observed movement – repetitive yet mutable – enhancing an immersive and mesmerizing experience.
Perhaps best known as a founding member of the Breeders, Josephine has collaborated with chameckilerner since Poor Reality (2001). She made the soundtrack for their short film Conversation With Boxing Gloves (2009). Recent film credits include the score for the feature film Appropriate Behavior (2014) and the score for the documentary film Built on Narrow Land (2012).
chameckilerner is a 20-year collaboration between Rosane Chamecki and Andrea Lerner. As Andre Lepecki wrote as early as 1993, at Tanz Actuelle when he first saw their work: “it is important to understand the choreographic reformulation proposed this season by choreographers Andrea Lerner and Rosane Chamecki … the will to break a tradition that by now suffocates the dance.”
Over 20 years, chameckilerner has created a body of work that has developed from dance performances, to video and installations. chameckilerner choreographed 12 full evening piece in addition to 7 commissioned works for other companies. Their work has been presented in the US by The Kitchen, DTW, The Joyce Theater, Performance Space 122, Central Park SummerStage, Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, Mass MoCA, Diverseworks , Jacob’s Pillow, American Dance Festival, among others. chameckilerner has toured extensively throughout Brazil as well as Canada, Venezuela, Portugal, The Netherlands, UK, Austria, Germany, Denmark, Finland, Colombia, Costa Rica, El Salvador, and Romania.
chameckilerner is the recipient of various fellowships and grants including the prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship in 2008, The Foundation for Contemporary Arts, NYFA, NYSCA, Jerome Foundation, Rockefeller Map Funds, Siemens, among others; and is featured in the 2014/Spring issue of BOMB Magazine, in a ten page interview with Eve Sussman.
In 2007, chameckilerner premiered EXIT at The Kitchen in New York City. The piece was an artistic suicide of the duo known as chameckilerner. In EXIT, they investigate the possibility of extinction and reinvention. EXIT also marked the beginning of chameckilerner’s interest in video and installation.
Since 2007, chameckilerner has created 8 short films. FLYING LESSON won the 36th Dance on Camera Festival at Lincoln Center; THE COLLECTION, commissioned by Robert Wilson’s Watermill Center; CONVERSATION WITH BOXING GLOVES BETWEEN CHAMECKI AND LERNER, commissioned by PERFORMA 09; and SAMBA#2 and ESKAZIER, through a residency at EMPAC, Troy, NY.
SAMBA #2 premiered in 2014 at the group show TUPI OR NOT TUPI at Museum Oscar Niemeyer, Brazil, followed by innumerous screenings in various international Festivals, winning HONORABLE PRIZE on both San Francisco Dance Film Festival and the INSHADOW Festival in Portugal. SAMBA #2 was also part of the group exhibitions BLUE PRINT at the Kunsthal KAdE Amersfoort, The Netherland, MOCA Tucson, and the Center for Art and Architecture in NYC.
Flying Lesson was part of the exhibition THE TRANSPORTATION BUSINESS at Jane Lombard Gallery. In April, 2015, ESKAZISER was exhibited at WASP (Working Art Space and Production) in Bucharest, Romania. In August chameckilerner had a retrospective of their video work at the Festival DANÇA EM FOCO, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
SAMBA #2 is being presented at The Wexner Center for The Arts in Columbus, Ohio, throughout the entire month of February.