COVERS: Rush Hour Art, New York Style
Covered in crochet
At the busy corner of 47th Street and Lexington Avenue, during the evening rush hour, New Yorkers encountered "COVERS," a performance in the window of the LAB Gallery. A collaboration between choreographer Carrie Ahern http://www.carrieahern.com/ and visual artist Olek http://agataolek.com/home.html, it was inspired by three book titles: “Woman, body, identity” "Ladies, Knights and Feminists" and "World without Women." According to the artists' blurb, the piece addresses how desires are projected onto the objects in store windows, and how those desires shift when the objects become live women, vulnerable to the audience’s gaze.
What it was like was more riveting and mysterious. Live women in a store window immediately capture one's attention. These dancers, draped in crochet, are goddesses clothed in recycled fibers, seen by the public through a window reinforced with silver tape in the shape of oversized chain mail. The small store environment is deranged with color, panels of crochet camouflage and shiny silver on the walls, plastic tentacles dangling from the ceiling, strips of tubing stretched from floor to ceiling. On the floor sits a human figure enclosed, except for eyes and glasses, in a red body bag, crocheting non-stop. Nearby are a matching pink television, chair, and dog-like hulk. The dancers move slowly through the space, each entangled in her own web. In the front window a dancer in white has an immense piece of fabric on her head that suggests a wedding veil with a long trunk-like train. Her dress of burlap hangs loosely around her body as she crawls to the window's edge, genuflects very slowly to the outside crowd, and enacts a dream-like sequence that ends with her picking up a small iron covered in crochet. With it, she irons a piece of her dress, then her foot, then her cheek and finally her tongue. A second dancer in the back is a striking beauty showing skin, wearing a hot pink head dress and black bustier. Caught in a giant net, she writhes in very slow motion, finally emerging to grasp a small watering can. The woman in white is a domestic sufferer, the one in pink and black, punishable for her sins, no doubt. The performance evolves very slowly over the course of an hour. The audience is out on the street, where city life is going on in all its teeming chaos. Passersby stop for a moment, watch with curiosity, wonder aloud about what's going on, and move on. A few linger and snap photos. One fella asks if he can jump on the girl the window. Another asks for an interpretation, but when a few sentences in her cell phone rings, that's that. The artists remain in their separate world. A moving and memorable experience.
Dancer Carrie Ahern
Dancer Jillian Hollis
Dora and Lisa