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Imperfecting a perfect(us).

Utopia is defined as a place of ideal perfection relating to law, government, and social conditions.

A framework of perfection is often a framework for order, law, precision, and limit.
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The sciences designate "perfection" as a model — a conceptual construct for bodies that in reality do not precisely correspond to the model.

For a vicarious audience continuously seeking pride and honor in the precision of the athlete, perfection is at last palpable, albeit fleeting.

For nine innings, Matt Cain was perfect.

Nadia Comaneci captured the hearts of the world and became the first gymnast in history to know what it's like to be perfect.

Jong-il bowled a perfect game-300, on his first time out bowling!

Just as the notoriously studious and athletic Greeks saw fit to legally bind public harmonies with a perfect tune, so too do the featured competitive performers seek to meet a binded, and perhaps blinded, sense of perfection through synchronized, collective movement.

Objectivism seeks perfection through the pursuit of knowledge, reason, and self; evident in the detailed and indexedAyn Rand Lexicon.

Yet these two utopic ideals (sport and objectivism) layered together reveal the paradox of perfection as imperfection; that no two logical truths can lead one down a single path.

That a formula for perfection only reveals the limit of its origin.

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RECAPS Magazine has published the series "Imperfecting a perfect(us)". You can see the work and read a Q&A between the editor, Martabel Wasserman and myself by navigating here: http://recapsmagazine.com/review/imperfecting-a-perfectus-love-space-and-beauty-by-megan-lavelle/

A big thank you to performers: Emily Tareila, Monte Masi, Dan Bouthot, Lex Kosieradzki, Clare Schweitzer, Lisa DeBassio, Cyrena Giordano.

The performance component to A Facade of Idyllic Fortitude was developed after months steeped in Beckett, Borges, and Melville while contemplating insurance, corporate output, branding, and personhood.

Podium studies for future sculptures.
Featuring podiums crafted for the following in order of appearance: President of the United States, The United Nations, Clint Eastwood at the Republican National Convention, Paul Ryan, Mitt Romney, the Pope, and Billy Graham.

Model for Infinite Growth (2013)
Megan Lavelle and Byron Peters
PDF File / Fax, Paper, Double Sided Tape
314" x 238"

Designed as a lightweight sculpture, Personal Podium allows for on-hand moments of significant address. Quick and easy to put together, this portable structure references town square soap box preachers with a bit of professional edge.

Isolating language to the hand, this video score again nods to the delicate choreography of Yvonne Rainer’s 1966 Hand Movie. Each gesture is a mood, an emotion, a direct statement collaged together in a kaleidoscope of meaning and a confusion of expression. As a loop, this piece is meant to provide anxious texture to a larger installation.

My role in the makeover is that of beautician as well as director. I direct the conversation with the tools I have, a few sponges and books to keep the conversation focused. Each transformation is a five step process centered around individual systems of identity and doctrine.

A documented process of undoing. Each participant is provided with a warm, damp cloth after their makeover to remove the contents of the makeover onto the cloth as a lasting shroud.

“Radical for capital"

Ayn Rand’s Objectivism is founded on the understanding that reason alone is the pathway to knowledge and as individuals we are responsible for ourselves, alone. This ethos subsequently opposes all notions of religion, collectivism, and altruism.

As she was writing her last piece of fiction, Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand relied on a small network of like-minded Individualists ironically self described as “The Collective”. This cohort consisted of one Alan Greenspan. Greenspan would go on to serve as Chairman of the Federal Reserve for almost twenty years serving an unprecedented five consecutive terms. Other key followers of Rand include Oracle founder Larry Ellison and Vice President nominee, Paul Ryan. This is a small, but very powerful selection of well-known Objectivists within current structures of finance, government, and commerce. If these men consider themselves to be modern “Randian Heros” and we are living within the conditions of capitalism they have themselves constructed then it is very likely there is a little Rand in each of us. Through an exchange of physical transformation, making what is invisible visible, then perhaps we can exorcise the radical out and consider what we can bring back in.

60 Ikea Sultan Lade bed slats

2012

Collaboration with David B. Smith.

If our eyeballs are the window to the soul then television is the light box entry point to life's many nuanced lessons. The 1970s brought a departure from the glossed and trimmed lifestyle of "Leave it to Beaver" and introduced a different set of circumstances, circumstances which included struggle and just the right amount of dysfunction. It could be said that the dysfunction serves as a psychological tool to help us appreciate our humanity, our own mistakes, our own economic reality, and possibly our own dysfunction. We are the person on the couch watching the centralized couch as our problems are mirrored back to us.
The goal here is to explore the ways in which we experience these contexts through "the set". The television set becomes the representation of our cultural identity of "home", but "the set" is also a construction, a flattened space.

2012

The foot replaces the hand in Yvonne Rainer’s Hand Movie. Each descent is fraught with it’s own unique struggle as the foot searches for solid ground and climbs into the studio.

2012

Quite literally two corners coming off the wall. The structures are fixed as two constants for my variable set of repeating interventions. Like a theatrical stage, each new intervention contains a specific set of symbols and materials in order to transform the environment and ultimately the identity of the piece.

2012

This two channel video piece documents the artist’s ability to laugh and cry at nothing. The effort toward either emotion requires an interior script of fiction, but each fiction is vastly different. Identifying triggers for either spectrum can be used as a devise to understand what happiness and sadness mean to us as individuals, but also how we actively express these emotions to another person and in this case, a camera.

Inspired by Beckett’s The Expelled, this two channel video explores individual duality through defensive movement.

Inspired by the science fiction novel, Solaris, this 45 second infinite yet finite loop depicts two hypothetical moons controlling the alien ocean central to the plot. Solaris’ ocean surface moves kinetically in the manner of a human muscle; it is the brain controlling perception within the space station. Meant as a synthesis of humor and control, the exhaling and inflating exercises personal agency to create form and narrative, albeit short.

2012

Ted Purves & Jacob Wick

Role: Designer

Year: 2013

(images shown are just a sample of the book)

The Social Practice Program at CCA publishes a book every Spring. Each year there is a theme, 2012's theme was "Power."
The editing committee decided to adopt the form of the annual report in lieu of the Occupy Wall Street movement synchronizing with our first year of graduate school at a very expensive art school. We used the traditional language of power as a device to discuss social practice as a practice idealized as living outside traditional markets, yet now caught in the ever growing market of education. It was uncomfortably easy to use the same opaque language so often found in traditional annual reports as a model for our work as artists and social practitioners.

Here is the blurb from Lulu:
Dedicated to intentional ambiguity for the definition of Social Practice (SOPR), now more than ever this book is critical to the climate and the flow of ideas and modalities. This collection of essays, graphs, images, illustrations, and correspondence is the fifth publication from the Social Practice Workshop at the California College of the Arts. Guest contributors include Amy Balkin, Ryan Gander, Betti Morenko, Dred Scott, and Sue Bell Yank.

I designed the publication and served as one of four on the editing committee along with Ilyse Iris Magy, Zoe McCloskey, and Lauren Marie Taylor. Below are some spreads from the book.

Download the book for free on Lulu!

Wattis Contemporary / John Baldessari: Class Assignments (optional)

2011

For this show students from California College of the Arts MFA program respond to Baldessari's teaching notes from his time as a professor at California Institute of the Arts (Cal Arts). The original course was titled Cal Arts Post Studio Art: Class Assignments (optional), 1970. With a total of 109 instructions, including "Create art from our procedures of learning. How does an infant learn?" and "What are the minute differences in things that are supposed to be the same?", it was a difficult task to choose just one. In the end I chose to interpret #18. Subvert real systems.

You can read more about the show and my piece here / KQED: Students Take on Baldessari Class Assignments

Phase Two: This second iteration of Assurance™ enters a fictional stage. The corporate entity becomes a character within it’s own narrative. It is a scripted character within a scripted space referencing corporate personhood and individual agency. The scene of Assurance™ challenges the viewer to delineate between that which is agent and that which is agency.

Laura Palmer's image systematically removed out of the pilot episode of 'Twin Peaks.'

2011

For six months I met with people to discuss their object of emotional significance as part of The Object Project. My request to meet is a prompt —permission given to release information sitting at the back of the throat. Each conversation reveals personal investment and exchange, a transaction of narrative, our shared communication catalyzed by an object, and how it collectively transforms relationships with our personal myths. Each participant’s story serves as research for the content of my works of fiction. These vignettes of imagined, intimate moments create a space separate from that of the original object and story.

2010

‘Surveyed’ examines the found, objectified remains of paradigm shifting events over the course of roughly a year. Similar in theory to Duchamp’s readymades, these modern artifacts are evidence of our current state of tangible life, language, and humor.

2008 - 2009

How We Dwell is an inves­ti­ga­tion into how we dis­play our objects within our dwelling space as exten­sion of both iden­tity and habit. Twice a month I leave my studio apart­ment and wel­come a new artist to move in. For three days they are granted full access to my life of objects and put together an instal­la­tion based on their per­sonal dwelling expe­ri­ence. I, in turn, move back in and live with their instal­la­tion, doc­u­ment­ing my expe­ri­ence with an essay, an open­ing for the pub­lic, and pho­tos.

Read more here.

Written about here:

Baltimore Interview
Baltimore City Paper

2007

‘Rest Stops’ is a year­long explo­ration of rest stops through­out the North­east Mid-Atlantic Region. The stops along the New Jer­sey and Penn­syl­va­nia turn­pikes were cho­sen specif­i­cally for their iso­la­tion. The user experience becomes robotic within the confines of this structure built for unilateral experiences. My time spent within the rest stops seeks to cap­ture the pro­found alter­ation of aware­ness, iso­la­tion, and sud­den moments of interaction.