Transvoyeur
Programme 2007
August
2007
Live
art produced and conceived by the Transvoyeur artists
to be presented at the international events of the Edinburgh
Fringe Festival 2007. Gaynor Evelyn Sweeney and
Tony Knox take their extraordinary live art and audience
participation interventions to Edinburgh.
Transvoyeur
Performance Art Platform 2007, Edinburgh Fringe Festival
2007.
Written by Lucia Andrea Sweeney.
Photographs by John Kelly, Tony Knox and Gaynor Evelyn
Sweeney.
21 August 2007.
Transvoyeur
artists Tony Knox and Gaynor Evelyn Sweeney presented
two very different live art and audience participation
projects for the Edinburgh Fringe Festival on 21 August
2007.
Sweeney,
an international performance artist, who has exhibited
from London, Paris, Berlin, US, Hong Kong and more,
produced a series of images inspired from an earlier
live art and digital video projects titled 'Darwinian
Donations DIY' (formerly at the View Two Gallery, Liverpool,
England). These photographic stills are explicit by
the nature of the subject and composition, which elucidates
to the physical action of self-insemination for the
purpose of conception. A series of these images were
mass produced and either posted or distributed throughout
Edinburgh with an invitation for those recipients to
retain and frame as art or to modify the surface and
return to the artists at her postal address in Liverpool.
Reactions varied with a consensus of awkwardness on
a subject, although innate to human procreation, still
clandestine in post modern societies sensitivities.
The
artist stated: “It was the objective to extend
further on this project I have been researching and
developing for two years. To take a standard format
of a photograph, something in everyone’s life
that we keep and treasure for memories. In a sense,
the photograph is comparative to the genes we pass down
and inherit. The various concepts of space, whether
the biological edifice of the human, the residues of
memory or an old photograph and the limitation and centralisation
to the subject contained, are all delineated from birth
to death and what remains are those reminders, social
artefacts, of those gone by, but equally so and reciprocal
the lineage to the next generation. These images of
self-insemination are intended to explicate that moment
of conception by the confrontational nature of the image.
It is inescapable, as is birth and death. To expose
the senses of the viewer in their own introspective
awareness of themselves and their position in time and
space by genetic consciousness. Indeed our own existence
is denoted by the biological function of the sexual
organ portrayed. The instructions of whether the viewer/recipient
is to keep or modify is integral and reflective of human
actions and intervention to how lives are lived, experiences
made and history realised. Moreover the decision on
intervention similar to that of the penetrations by
the self for life”.
Knox
instigated ‘Flights to Freedom’ performance
throughout the city of Edinburgh. The alter ego of Knox
in the guise of Mothman is a lycra clad Superhero. From
the hive of the urban spaces of the city at dusk, he
stands in front of the traffic lights in the centre
of a hectic road on Princes Street. With gauche and
cumbersome movements, the ‘creature’ moves
their arms indicative of attempted flight. Pedestrians
and drivers passed bewildered by this apparition. The
performance continued through the city to exit on the
main roads into the city surrounded by fields and leading
to the river Fife. The flapping and frenzy prevailed
along train lines and culminates to the waters edge.
Other sightings in these performance interventions are
encountered by members of the public in parks and shopping
precincts. Mothman can be observed jumping repeatedly
from a park bench trying futile to reach a street light.
Each of these live art actions formed a series of events
by Knox.
Knox
expands further on this journey and flight of Mothman:
“The city of Edinburgh became witness to Mothman.
The golden figure who from Princes Street and further
manoeuvres throughout the various conduits of the urban
space. Wings moving manically to try to suggest attempted
flight. These episodes were captured by the support
photography of John Kelly. Some of the actions seems
not only transient, but static on some of the shots.
I am not saying I am Mothman. Simply that he and I were
in the same place!”
Further
information is available at:
Gaynor
Evelyn Sweeney: www.gaynorevelynsweeney.co.uk
Tony Knox: www.tonyknox.org.uk,
www.mothman.org.uk
Transvoyeur: www.transvoyeur.com
