ALEXA WILSON VIDEO RETROSPECTIVE: SELECTED 5 VIDEOS OVER 20 YEARS

Adam Art Gallery Te Pātaka Toi, Te Herenga Waka-Victoria University, Kelburn Parade, Wellington

01/11/2023 - 05/11/2023

Performance Art Week Aotearoa

Production Details


Artist: Alexa Wilson, Curator: Sara Cowdell

Performance Art Week Aotearoa


ALEXA WILSON VIDEO RETROSPECTIVE: SELECTED 5 VIDEOS OVER 20 YEARS
As a trained performance, dance and video artist filmmaker Alexa Wilson presenting across NZ, Europe, North America and Asia has created and infused video work within and around her performance practice for 25 years. The 5 selected works are from different projects, but each work centres the artist’s own body as social commentary in these instances. Across this 2 decade span into the 21st Century these works reflect conversations between the urgency of our times – from gender politics interrogating nature/culture, sexuality, love and power, to ecological and social crisis affecting relationships to social care, sustainability and notions of death.

Adam Art Gallery, on each day and night during Performance Art Week Aotearoa 1-5th November.
10am-10pm each day (closed 5pm till evening performances start.)

No need to book! Just show up!

Alexa Wilson Video Retrospective: Selected 5 videos over 20 years


Artist: Alexa Wilson, Curator: Sara Cowdell


Experimental dance , Dance ,


35 minutes

Consciousness in a stream, searching for a visa.

Review by Lyne Pringle 06th Nov 2023

Alexa Wilson prolific artist who creates solo, political and relational (immersive) performance art projects and group choreographies, some commissioned.
Retrospective, Adam Art Gallery, video works stacked in row – twenty years, five videos on three screens looping – impressively laid out from above, confronting and personal from close-up. 
Curated from an impressive and vast array of practice, roaming over many disciplines. Densely packed. Difficult to unpack in the time it takes to view.
This response endeavours to find the thread/non thread . . .
A brief exposé as time allows.

Queen of juxtapositions.
Remembering dreams, silver suited or disrobing, feeling death, musing on death interviewing death in a high heeled writhe, driving through burning places, politics, skeletons – ‘we’re dying, the planet’s sick – we don’t want to see’. 
Noah’s artifice, pig face, sword, blood, body centred, vulva, naked whirl, swat, hand-knee-pant, dancing while Rome burns. Knickers ½ mast, belly flop, childhood poverty faintly crackling softly echoes, crack shot – lightbulb moment, stagger, blindfolded, the body pared down over decades. CNZ trophy in and out of focus. Coffee smear, political espresso, good for the skin.
Chained face monologue layered on sweet  singing, ‘totem animals, life is short, life is long’. I’m interested in love. I’m confused, no I’m not. Love, love, passion, intimacy, creativity. What is creative?’ Sifting through a dating profile. Consciousness in a stream, searching for a visa. ‘Being intuitive’. 
Would you stand by me naked on a construction site? Tiger skin. A bulls eye of cyber-fear. 

Context as given:

‘As a trained performance, dance and video artist filmmaker Alexa Wilson presenting across NZ, Europe, North America and Asia has created and infused video work within and around her performance practice for 25 years. The 5 selected works are from different projects, but each work centres the artist’s own body as social commentary in these instances. Across this 2 decade span into the 21st Century these works reflect conversations between the urgency of our times – from gender politics interrogating nature/culture, sexuality, love and power, to ecological and social crisis affecting relationships to social care, sustainability and notions of death.’

Danger 2002 (9 mins) using abusing clichés – dangerous woman – endangered animals – psychoanalysis castrates women’s power.

Alien 
2023 (5 mins) NYC rooftop – alien body. Part dance, part embodied ted talk, part poetry, part cyberpunk, part esoteric performance art, part possession, part song – explores the body as foreign to self and others, often alienated inside change.
https://vimeo.com/782597458/76fd56890d

Dancing While Rome Burns: Death Interviews version 
2022 (11 mins) – post pandemic NY pre-pandemic Berlin 2019 varied content from various sources

Coffee Skincare Routine Helps Politically!! 
(Part of The Politics of Dreaming MPhil) 2020 (3mins) Wildfire was selected early 2019 as a metaphor for political dreaming and the activation, agency, emergency, re/generativeness and transformation occurring at this time in regard to socio-political global contexts, with reference to ecology and intersectional social movements (as emergent strategies) responding to crisis. Feminist agency is activated also through the multiple pleasures of multi-positionality and playful. subversion embodied within different practices. Emerging is a commentary on the tension (online/irl) between activism and self-improvement within digital Capitalism, addressing sometimes reconciling contradictions of collective/individual, personal/political, public/private, which dominate the social media sphere (as a political dreaming)

Face Chain Filter: Dating Profile/Advice 2023 MUST SEE! (Love Project, 2023) (12 mins) part of a larger video project in process shot across 2023 in NY, LA, NZ and Berlin.Love Project collages visually, aurally and psychologically activating elements infusing interviews and poetic imagery together to enable clashing and changing ideologies to be in conversation, scrutinising societal understandings of types of love/sex and current attitudes in an emotive and critical edited series of videos which reflect the confusion in our global relationality.’

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