SEPTEMBER 10, 17, 24, AND OCTOBER 1, 2022 | 7–10 PM
SWEPT AWAY: Love Letter to a Surrogate(s)
by Warren Neidich
Join us at East Hampton Main Beach on four consecutive Saturday nights – September 10, 17, 24, and October 1 between 7-10PM for a series of unmissable happenings.
Swept Away: Love Letter to a Surrogate(s) will take place at the water’s edge in front of the Pavilion at Main Beach in East Hampton. Attendees can watch or be an active participant and enjoy the evening’s festivities.
Warren Neidich notes “Swept Away: Love Letter to a Surrogate is a community oriented artistic project that aims to create a transcontinental heartbeat across America. It is hoped that through its combined gestures and performances, a sense of solidarity, so desperately missing today, will emerge with which to confront the ecological catastrophe at our doorstep.”
The syncopated sound of the surf will provide the background acousmatic. This poetic project in some ways harkens back to the Happenings staged by Allan Kaprow in 1966 all through the South Fork: https://alastairgordonwalltowall.com/2018/02/07/gas-i-am-a-happener-1966-east-hampton/
Artist Warren Neidich who created the successful Drive by Art event in 2020. The project is co-curated and co-coordinated by Christina Strassfield, Museum Director/Chief Curator of Guild Hall, Anuradha Vikram, Los Angeles based independent curator, and Los Angeles based conceptual artist Renee Petropoulos, plus administrative coordination by Julie McKim. 65 artists living in on the East End and 65 west coast artists are participating in this community and family-based Art Happening. In the spring the reverse will occur; with East End artists writing love letters to LA artists to be executed at Will Rogers State Beach, Santa Monica in conjunction with the 18th Street Arts Center.
At Main Beach, artists will create ephemeral performative gestures of immateriality or time-based works on the beach. This could be making a sandcastle, singing a song, reciting poetry, dancing, make a sculpture that interacts with the tide, collecting shells, doing a light projection on Main Beach pavilion, picking up garbage on the beach, etc. The works could be political and deal with global warming and its effects on the water level or could be apolitical and talk about the natural beauty of the real in opposition to the digital and virtual.
The importance of biodegradable, non-toxic materials will be essential as well as leaving the beach pristine after the work. Each artist has been linked up to a west coast artist who will email instructions – a love letter – for a work of art that the local artist will incorporate into their performative piece, acting as a surrogate.
The list of East End and West Coast artist pairings is as follows:
EAST END ARTISTS > LOS ANGELES ARTISTS
Pamella Allen > Jade Gordon + Megan Whitmarsh
Suzanne Anker > Margarethe Drexel
Elena Bajo > Jasmine Orpilla
Lillian Ball > Dana Duff
Monica Banks > Jamie Ross
Dianne Blell > Lisa Anne Auerbach
Scott Bluedorn > Robby Herbst
Sanford Biggers > Sterling Wells
Megan Chaskey > Lionel Popkin
Scott Chaskey > Kathryn Andrews
Philippe Cheng > David Horvitz
Andrea Cote > Nina Waisman
Ivana Dama > Rodrigo Arruda
Peter Dayton > Anita Pace
Katrina Del Mar > Taisha Paggett + Meital Yaniv
Jeremy Dennis > Debra Disman
Sabra Moon Elliot > Rochelle Fabb
Carol Edwards > Pamela Hudson
Eva Faye > Patty Chang + David Kelly
Saskia Friedrich > Fran Siegel
Margaret Garrett > Susan Kleinberg
Veronica Gonzales > Cassandra Marketo
Kimberly Goff > Cheri Gaulke + Xochi Maberry-Gaulke
Jeremy Grosvenor > Vincent Johnson
Jerelyn Hanrahan > Andrew Berardini
Candace Hill Montgomery > Anna Joy Springer
Virva Hinnemo > Sam Shoemaker
Alice Hope > Krysten Cunningham
Erica-Lynn Huberty > Sandeep Mukherjee
Terri Hyland > Joseph Mosconi
Ruby Jackson > Alice Könitz
Ilya + Emelia Kabakov > Carolyn Castano
Carlos Lama > Elisabeth Houston
Laurie Lambrecht > May Sun
Joseph Liatela > Badly Licked Bear
Donald Lipski > Raul Baltazar
Sutton Lynch > Yrneh Gabon Brown
Josephine Meckseper > Jiayun Chen
Paul Miller > Lucia Santini Ribisi
Tanya Minhas > Allison Wyper
Richard Mothes > Kristin Calabrese
Michelle Murphy > Sarah Beadle
Jill Musnicki > Victoria Vesna
Eileen O’Kane Kornreich > Iman Person
Dalton Portella > Ryat Yezbick
Jaanika Peerna > Marcus Kuiland Nazario
Toni Ross > Sharon Barnes
David Rothenberg > Beatriz Cortez
Will Ryan > Jody Zellen
Sara Salaway > Melinda Altshuler
Matthew Satz > Katie Grinnan
Bastienne Schmidt > Jisoo Chung
Barry Schwabsky > David Schafer
Christine Sciulli > Karen Lofgren
Arlene Slavin > Jenny Yurshansky
Janice Stanton > Kearra Gopee
Christina Sun > Catherine Scott
Carol Szymanski > Xiouping
Sara VanDerBeek > Alicia Serling
Ryan Wallace > Joshua Aster
Ross Watts > Justine Harari
Allan Wexler > Dan Kwong
Nina Yankowitz > Francesca Gabbiani
Darius Yektai > Barbara McCarren + Jud Fine
Almond Zigmund > Marissa Mandler
ABOUT WARREN NEIDICH
Warren Neidich uses written texts and neon-light sculptures to create cross-pollinating conceptual works that reflect upon situations at the border zones of art, science, and social justice. His performative and sculptural work Pizzagate Neon (2018), recently on display at the Venice Biennale 2019, analyzed, through a large hanging neon light sculpture, fake news and the post-truth society. Selected exhibitions include the Whitney Museum of American Art, PS1 MOMA, White Columns, Walker Art Center MIT List Visual Art Center, (Cambridge), Los Angeles County Museum of Art, National Museum of American Art (Washington D.C., US), Museum Ludwig (Köln, Germany), Haus Der Kunst (Munich), Zentrum für Kunst and Media (Karlsruhe, Germany), ICA London, Palais Tokyo (Paris, France), Villa Arson (Nice, France) and Kunsthaus Zürich. He has been a visiting lecturer in the Departments of Art at Brown University, GSD Harvard University, Columbia University, Princeton University, University of California, Los Angeles, the Sorbonne in Paris, France; and the University of Oxford and Cambridge University in the UK. His work has been the subject of over 150 magazine and newspaper articles, including The New York Times, Time Magazine, Artforum, Art in America, Kunstforum International, The Art Newspaper, Smithsonian Magazine, The Chicago Tribune, Hyperallergic, Artnet, GQ, Forbes, Vogue IT, Monopol, Performance Art Journal, , Time Out, The New Yorker, New York Magazine, Los Angeles Times, The Village Voice, and Frieze.