12/3/16 ROT: Compost vs Surgery at Seattle Art Museum

ROT: Compost vs. Surgery

Saturday, December 3, 3-5pm
$ Free; RSVP Requested.
Video screening at Seattle Art Museum
Attendees are invited to view SAM's Big Picture exhibition free of charge following the screening.

ROT: Compost vs. Surgery is a video and audio screening that links a tradition of visceral painterly physicality to urgent contemporary conversations about bodies, aging, identity and health.

When body time meets linear time, ROT demands progress. Rotten things can be either integrated in a healthy way (compost and renewal) or excised and burned (surgery). To ROT is to inhabit a critical bodily process in the midst of an infinite, unresolvable trajectory. ROT gathers momentum in cycles of attack, sustain, decay and release. ROT implies hope in survival, in coping and in stasis.

In ROT, artists combine video, sound, performance and multimedia poetry to revisit the Abstract Expressionists, Vienna Actionists, post-minimalist artists, and feminist performance artists. Proximity to SAM’s Big Picture: Art After 1945 exhibition raises the question: are ROT artists composting the canon, or are these works a surgical redirection of art history?

Curated by Molly Mac and S. Surface of The Alice. 

EXHIBITING ARTISTS:
Indira Allegra (Oakland)
Kerry Downey (NYC)
C Davida Ingram (Seattle)
On a Clear Day (NYC)
Catherine Telford-Keogh (Toronto)
tzuriel (San Diego and Seattle)
Urban Death Project (Seattle)