عينت عمير   EINAT AMIR   עינת עמיר

Ideal Viewer: Phase One

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Opening a voyeuristic lens onto conflicting authorship, Ideal Viewer is a two-phased series of performances, beginning with actors hired from Craigslist to improvise three biographical archetypes in Scaramouche’s gallery space—a Crying Woman (Melia Smith), an Ex-Boyfriend (Yoav Levin), and an Interpreter (Ryan Andes). After advertising the actors’ services in the gallery and online, the second phase effectively gave the reins to Performa’s audience, enabling intimate, unmediated encounters between performer and spectator in the spectators’ own private spaces. Partly staged, partly improvised, partly real-time, partly pre-recorded, Ideal Viewer withholds any resolution as to what is authentic, fabricated, or otherwise manipulated. Provoking sexual sport, “author function” dysfunction, and technological disorientation, Ideal Viewer explored sexual and artistic identity, blurring the very notion of what is “real.”.

 

Ideal Viewer: Phase Two

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11am – 12pm: Genevieve Belleveau’s The Church of GorgeousTaps and the Reality Show with the Crying Woman. Through the “power of suggestion” and “nostalgia inducing media,” the Crying Woman became the living altarpiece of an outdoor service that revised Lutheran rituals to create a secular, emotional theatrical event.

 

1pm – 2pm: Rafael Rosenberg’s New York Art Gallery Tours with the Interpreter.“Art history in the making”:  Rafael Rosenberg, Phd, lead a guided gallery tour of SoHo and the Lower East Side accompanied by the Interpreter’s operatic and art historical interjections.

 

5pm – 6pm: The Ex-Boyfriend impersonates Joseph Roumeliotis’ ex-boyfriend impersonating Freddie Mercury.Through on-the-spot instruction and critique, Joseph Roumeliotis helped Ideal Viewer’s Ex-Boyfriend portray his own ex-boyfriend performing as Freddie Mercury in “Love Kills.”

 

Presented by Scaramouche Gallery. Curated by David Everitt Howe.  Selected by Performa 09 as part of “Lust Weekend”