Hunger

source: vimeo

‘Hunger’ uses the familiarity of the dinner table to isolate and augment the subtext of small talk between intimate pairs. Two women sit motionless for five hours, looking at each other from across a bare table. The women are physically connected by a knitted form suggesting warmth and coziness, but also a shared straitjacket, confining each to the unrelenting mirroring of the other. In this heightened visual metaphor, each woman has only a single sentence to offer. One is desperate for attention and approval (“Is it good?”), the other is withholding (“If I don’t say anything, it’s good”). Each woman is therefore isolated in her proximity to the other. Exploring the myriad relationships between two people: lovers, parent/child, teacher/student, friends, colleagues, clerk/client, ‘Hunger’ considers all the ways we cannot communicate, but long to connect.
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source: thecontextspl

Founded in 2010, Longva+Carpenter is a collaborative partnership with Norwegian multi-media artist Terese Longva and US performance/installation artist Laurel Jay Carpenter. As interdisciplinary artists, Longva+Carpenter share interests in site, duration and the accumulation of action. After meeting in New York, the pair has been collaborating to present new works that manipulate the body and time in their investigation of personal longings, feminist ideologies and political urgencies.

Longva+Carpenter’s Needs Trilogy, consisting of the durational performance/installations Hunger, Thirst and Shelter has been exhibited at the Bergen International Festival in Norway; Big Orbit Gallery in Buffalo, NY; Microscope Gallery in Bushwick, Brooklyn; and Rochester Contemporary Art Center in Rochester, NY. The artists have presented their work in lectures at Alfred University, The University of Northern Iowa in the US and at Ålesund Art School (Kunstfagskole). The Needs Trilogy is also documented in the annual Emergency Index, Journal of New Performance, for both 2011 and 2012.

Laurel Jay Carpenter’s participation in Contexts 2014 Festival is funded, in part, by the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences at Alfred University