Performance Works NW || Alembic Co-Production Series presents
The Word Hand
Created and performed by
Linda Austin, Pat Boas and Linda Hutchins
Performances:
October 23-25, Thursday-Saturday at 8pm
Drawings on view:
October 24-26, Friday-Sunday 2-5pm (free)
Performance Works NW * 4625 SE 67th Ave
Tickets: $10-$25 at the door or in advance HERE
Dancer Linda Austin and visual artists Pat Boas & Linda Hutchins navigate the walls and floor of PWNW to create drawings through performance. Their work, developed in collaboration over the last year and a half, places drawing in a visibly time-based context and ritualizes it as record and residue of movement. They employ unusual drawing strategies and tools to extend, deflect, and disrupt their physical behavior. The resulting drawings can be read as transcriptions of both movement and language.
These performances and open viewing hours are the culmination of a long-term collaboration that has developed through residencies and presentations by Austin, Boas and Hutchins at Caldera, Wieden + Kennedy, and Project Cityscope’s The New Structure. The Word Hand is funded in part by a Project Grant from the Regional Arts and Culture Council.
BIOS:
LINDA AUSTIN is co-founder (with Jeff Forbes) and director of Performance Works NorthWest in Portland, OR. Her working process exploits the body’s powers and limits, bringing each performer’s vulnerabilities and strengths, accidental awkwardness and elegance, into a web of relationships—intimate, playful, confrontational—with other bodies, objects, environment, sound and media. Austin has performed in New York, Mexico City, Seattle and Portland, at venues such as Danspace Project, PS 122, Movement Research at Judson Church, the Kitchen, On the Boards and PICA’s TBA Festival. Award include Fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Oregon Arts Commission and, most recently in 2014, the prestigious RACC Performing Arts Fellowship. Her work has also been supported by project grants from the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation, the Regional Arts & Culture Council and the Calligram Fund for New Work through PICA. Among Austin’s recent projects are Three Trick Pony, a collaboration with sculptor David Eckard and composer Doug Theriault for TBA:13, and Hummingbird, a solo that premiered at On the Boards’ NW New Works Festival.
PAT BOAS makes drawings, paintings, prints and digital projects that explore the play between words and images, the nature of codes and the stories hidden in familiar grammatical structures. Her work has been shown at the Portland Art Museum, the Boise Art Museum; the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Salt Lake Art Center, the Nicolaysen Museum in Casper, Wyoming and the Center on Contemporary Art in Seattle, Washington. She is the recipient of the 2012 Bonnie Bronson Fellowship, as well as fellowships and grants from the Pollack-Krasner Foundation, the Ford Family Foundation and Oregon’s Regional Arts and Culture Council. Reviews of her visual work have appeared in Art in America and Art Papers. Boas has written articles and reviews for Art Papers, artUS and Artweek. She is a member of the Art Practice faculty at Portland State University’s School of Art + Design.
LINDA HUTCHINS uses drawing to investigate the bilateral nature of human experience and perception. In her recent projects, she embraces the sounds produced while drawing, harnessing their percussive rhythm to create drawings and installations that are inseparable from the process of their making. Hutchins has received two Individual Artist Fellowships from the Oregon Arts Commission, three Project Grants from the Regional Arts & Culture Council, and the Jurors’ Award in the Tacoma Art Museum’s 2009 Northwest Biennial. Her work has been reviewed in Art in America and featured on the cover of American Craft. Hutchins holds a BSE in Computer Engineering from the University of Michigan and a BFA in Drawing from Pacific Northwest College of Art. Before attending art school, she wrote operating system software for Intel Corporation. She lives and works in a renovated warehouse in Portland, Oregon.