An Evening of Play

Start Date: July 17, 2009
‘Lucullan Feast’ opening: 7-9pm
‘A Dark Room’ Performance
End Date: July 31, 2009
Organized by Andrea Hill

Galley MC will host an evening of events that broadly explore Lev
Vygotsky’s concept of play as a spontaneous process toward abstract
thought. Everything is permissible in the play arena and the child is
free to experience emotive associations. Words become part of a
thing. The thing activates ideas. In a return to this early stage of
cognition, these projects understand playing as an unstructured
process to generate new idea flashes or to feed artistic practice.
Serious and jovial intentions, group structures and individual design
meet on the playground.

On Friday July 17, artists will literally play with their food, adopt
new personae through role play and performance and implicate audiences
in group play. The evening begins with the ‘Lucullan Feast,’ a
gathering of artists around a dining table to present food as
interactive sculpture and sensory experience. The cultural history of
food has made compelling connections between visual stimulation and
appetite linked with the idea that ‘we eat with our eyes before we eat
with our mouth.’ The project asks artists to consider the inherently
visual qualities of food, and in the process, to implement alternate
modes of function and presentation by re-inventing the vessels,
containers or utensils associated with their chosen dish. The
‘Lucullan Feast’ is a lavish buffet of ideas, a profusion of playful
outcomes, a contempt for limitations and an invitation to taste.

‘Lucullan Feast’ includes work by
Rica Borich
Brett Budde
Ann Cleary
Tyler Coburn
Michael DeLucia
Alexa Forosty
Craig Hein
Hein Koh
Shaun Krupa
Yui Kugimiya
Cary Leibowitz
Ted Mineo
Julia Rommel
Hanna Sandin
Adam Sipe

Concurrent with the feast, Tova Carlin and Luke Stettner will launch
‘A Dark Room,’ a roving photo studio and collaborative force between
the artists. Subjects are led into a dark room to dress themselves
with props and costumes and are photographed