New Tang Video Installation – Honey Baby – Now Open
Third work in Janine Antoni + Stephen Petronio: Entangle
SARATOGA SPRINGS, NY (May 10, 2017) — The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College presents the video installation Honey Baby, the third work of the exhibition Janine Antoni + Stephen Petronio: Entangle, now through Sunday, July 16.
Honey Baby is an immersive experience created by Antoni and Petronio. The spectator reclines on the horizontal plane to view the video above, confounding our notion of the body’s relation to gravity. The video, inspired by motion in utero, captures a folding and tumbling male body suspended in a honey-filled environment. Viscous liquid dripping down a body in developmental transformation reveals a uniquely sensual relationship between subject and host. The fourteen-minute video brings you incrementally closer, until a collapse of space presses the viewer up against the body.
Like Lazarus Did (2013) was the first collaboration between Antoni and Petronio. The final dance of this work, Trevor, was drawn from sonograms of a child developing in utero. This stage work, which was performed by Nick Sciscione, a member of Petronio’s dance company, was the starting point for Honey Baby. Sciscione will appear at the Tang periodically over the course of the exhibition to perform Trevor live in the space.
Honey Baby, and the previous two works— Rope Dance and On the Table—combine action, video, and installation. The works explore a range of ongoing multidisciplinary collaborations, which the artists began more than three years ago, setting out to blur the lines between artist, dancer, choreographer, and audience. Each offering has one element in common—a wooden floor—that frames different activities understood through the body.
Janine Antoni + Stephen Petronio: Entangle is organized by Dayton Director Ian Berry, in collaboration with the artists, and is supported by the Friends of the Tang. Janine Antoni and Stephen Petronio are Skidmore College’s 2016-17 Don and Judy McCormack Endowed Visiting Artist-Scholars in Residence, which is administered by the Office of the Dean of Special Programs.
The Stephen Petronio Company will be in residence in June 2017, offering a workshop to pre-professional and professional dancers as part of Skidmore College’s annual Summer Dance Workshop.
