Math Bass and Lauren Davis Fisher:
Quiet Work In Session

Floor Three, Susan and John Hess Family Theater

Calder: Hypermobility features an expansive series of performances and events, bringing contemporary artists into dialogue with Alexander Calder as they interplay their own disparate practices with his innovations. For their contribution to Calder: Hypermobility, Los Angeles-based artists Math Bass (b. 1981) and Lauren Davis Fisher (b. 1984) restage their first collaborative performance, Quiet Work In Session. With artists Savannah Knoop (b. 1981) and Lee Relvas (b. 1981), Bass and Fisher perform a series of choreographed movements and sounds while using structural supports, banner-like scrolls, and everyday props to explore, in their words, “shifting relations between the body, the materials, and the audience.”

Bass and Fisher reimagine this piece as both a script and score. At times, operating as laborers, the performers carry out carefully plotted actions to reconstruct the structures and scrolls, transforming them from backdrop to doorway to curtain and ultimately, to painting. The stage and tableau are activated in the absence of the performers through recorded music and sounds, live vocals, lights, and moving objects. Interested in both theatrical experience and object-making, Bass and Fisher direct themselves and their fellow performers to take on various roles and relationships on stage, circumventing traditional boundaries between performance, theater and exhibition.

Quiet Work In Session was first performed at Disjecta Contemporary Art Center in Portland, Oregon in 2014. The performance at the Whitney will be the artists’ first reinterpretation of this work.

September 30, 2017
8 pm

October 1, 2017
4 pm

Doors open a half an hour in advance of performance start time. Tickets are required ($25 adults; $18 students and seniors; free for members). Museum admission included in ticket purchase. Capacity is limited. Visitors are encouraged to purchase tickets in advance. Online ticket sales close two hours before the performance begins. Any remaining tickets will be sold at the admissions desk on a first-come, first-served basis.

About the artists

Math Bass is a Los Angeles-based artist who works in a range of mediums, including painting, sculpture, video and performance. She received her MFA from UCLA in 2011. Since then, her work has been the subject of museum exhibitions at UCLA (2011); MoMA PS1, New York (2015); Oakland Museum of California (2017); and Yuz Museum, Shanghai, China (2017). Bass has performed and participated in group exhibitions at Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art, Oslo, Norway (2016); The Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2012 and 2016); Performa 15, New York (2015); Cooper Union, New York (2015); The Drawing Room, London (2015); and 356 Mission, Los Angeles (2013).

Born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Lauren Davis Fisher creates large-scale sculptural and performance-based installations. She received her BA from Brown University in 2007 and now lives and works in Los Angeles. Fisher has performed and exhibited at MoMA PS1, New York (2008 and 2015); Fringe Fest, New Orleans (2009); RK Projects, Providence, RI (2012); Parkview, Los Angeles (2015); Performa 15, New York (2015); Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA (2014); and she recently participated in Made in L.A. 2016 at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2017).