January 25, 2024, Thursday, 7:30pm to 9:30pm
Bungee Space, 13 Stanton St, New York, NY 10002
January 25, 2024, 7:30pm to 9:30pm – Bungee Space is pleased to invite you to a unique event on the occasion of the release of Part 2: Dive from My Summit Is Out of Reach, the third work in a series of “performances arranged for print” (see here) by Matty Davis in collaboration with Matt Wolff. The event will feature an opportunity to view and read previously published parts of My Summit Is Out of Reach (Prologue and Part 1: Ascend), as well as a conversation between Matty Davis and artist Ben Gould.
This event is FREE to the public, please RSVP using the form below.
Comprising thirteen parts, My Summit Is Out of Reach is designed to be experienced over an indeterminate amount of time, one part after the next received via USPS—a slow unfolding that charts the performer moving across numerous mountain ranges in the United States as they search for “the surface and the slope.” The surface and the slope is a particular surface and slope angle that enables a small choreographic act, and its search thrusts the performer into relation with other species, ecosystems, histories, and senses of time and scale that induce reckonings with our own bodies, our place in the world, and dance itself. My Summit Is Out of Reach exists in a finite edition of 13. It features dramaturgy and editing by Shannon Stewart, with photographic contributions by Andy Gohlich and Ross Mantle
This event at Bungee Space is part of a growing series of similar events in various town and cities throughout the country that are designed to create a live, shared space around an artwork that is small, ephemeral, time-based, and slow-moving in the spirit of certain aspects of geologic and biological time that it is in conversation with. Each event takes place at the home or address of the one of the work’s current audience members.
Light refreshments will be available, and a small edition of darkroom prints related to Prologue, Part 1: Ascend, and Part 2: Dive will be available for purchase for $150 each.
Matty Davis is an artist and choreographer engaged in collaborative, embodied explorations of the tension between our fragility and our fortitude. His work frequently uses choreography as an instrument to cultivate high-stakes relationships—ranging from the interpersonal to the cosmic—that push himself and others to creatively face and negotiate forces that drive some of the most important parts of our lives: trust, risk, love, empathy, commitment, and responsibility. Marked by full-throttle physicality and inventive movement vocabularies, his performances have been described as “balancing ecstatically on the edge of life and death” (Jesse Zaritt).
Matty was born near Pittsburgh, PA, where his grandfather worked in the steel mills and his dad’s plane crashed, killing him and 131 other people. Visceral understandings of labor, loss, control, and bodily violence braid with Matty’s history as a multi-sport athlete, which imbued him with visceral experiences of pain, teamwork, and play. While expansive in subject matter and material outcomes—books, sculpture, drawing, and photography—his work predominantly manifests in performance and dance, which he values as communal space in which to be transformatively alive.
Over the last decade, Matty’s work has been presented by various institutions in the US and abroad, in addition to many intentional site-specific locations integral to the meaning a given work, from mountains to hurricane-churned shorelines, living rooms to the gritty concrete of New York City. Institutionally, Matty’s work has been presented by the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, The Momentary, the ICA Miller at Carnegie Mellon University, the Fine Arts Center at the University of Arkansas, The Anderson at Virginia Commonwealth University, Kanal Centre Pompidou, Bozar, the Palais de Tokyo, the Max Ernst Museum, Pioneer Works, Steppenwolf Theater, et al. He is the author of six books, and since 2021 has been trailblazing a new form, “performance arranged for print,” with long-standing collaborator Matt Wolff. As part of his collaborative practice, he has worked with artists including Hito Steyerl, writers including Will Arbery and Chloé Cooper Jones, and many other folks across the vocational spectrum: surgeons, carpenters, aviators, athletes, and environmentalists. He loves to teach and work with people of all ages and ability levels and has done so at many different colleges, universities, schools, and organizations.
Ben Gould is an artist currently living and working in New York City. After the sudden and late development of Tourette Syndrome, Gould’s studio practice has transformed to harbor an investment in the body, exploring limits, resistance, and the loss of control. Grounded in performance, his multidisciplinary practice is built upon intimacy, urgency, collaboration, and learning – cultivated by a deep interest in how energy is directed, rerouted, transformed and transferred. His condition has become a motor for movement-based performance, driving an evolving practice of energetic restraint and release learned through training and research into the specifics of his own body and other energy systems. Within a growing mythos that has materialized through this exploration, a space for fantasy and freedom is created through the corresponding objects that emerge from the process. Gould’s work, while rooted in performance, draws from the history of sculpture, the built and natural world, ancient symbology, and a care for the principles of craft. Sculpture, drawing, images and video are used to further research and expand ideas into new forms. With the body as a source - and often in collaboration with others , materials, and the environment - each endeavor is powered by a search for deeper understanding, meaning, transformation, and empathy.
Gould has performed site-specific works throughout the country, from varied landscapes to institutional spaces – leading to solo gallery exhibitions, performances at museums and cultural centers, and extensive collaborations across disciplines. He has performed and coordinated projects at unique sites such as salt flats in Death Valley, a limestone cave in Kansas City, a bunker in the Marin Headlands, and a moving vessel on the Chicago River. Gould received his BFA from the Kansas City Art Institute in 2015, apprenticed with master craftsmen in California, and was a 2015 Ox-Bow Fellow. He was an artist-in-residence at Kickstarter’s Headquarters in 2017 and at Queenslab in New York City in 2018. He is a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant recipient, was a Haystack Open Studio Resident in 2019, a 2020 Lighton International Artists Exchange Program grant recipient, and a 2021 NYFA Fellow in Interdisciplinary Work.
Born in Grass Valley, California in 1993, Gould was raised in the foothills of the Sierra Mountains in a Gold Rush era town, between decommissioned mines and the Yuba River – the geography of which has greatly informed his commitment to site specific projects and reinforced the importance of place. Most recently, Gould has been presented by and shown new works and performances at KANAL Centre Pompidou, Liberal Arts Roxbury, Bozar, and The Center for Craft.