Month: June 2020

Conduct Matters: Twitch Performance by Jeanine Oleson with performers Beth Griffith, Lisa Reynolds, and Diwa Tamrong

Jeanine Oleson’s 2020 Kitchen Broadcast was timed with the release of the book Conduct Matters. For her presentation for Kitchen Broadcast, Oleson and ongoing collaborators and performers Beth Griffith, Lisa Reynolds, and Diwa Tamrong use the space of the screen to reexamine language and ideas about subject and alienation, working to find ways the screen might be an embodied site for performance. Conduct Matters presents Oleson’s ongoing, sharply absurdist response to research on the ways copper is produced and used in 21st-century capitalism. By exploring conduction as a material, political, musical, and ethical phenomenon in collaboration with an ensemble cast (Beth Griffith, Lisa Reynolds, and Diwa Tamrong, alongside Oleson) who take the production cycle of copper as the ground to examine communication, technology, and the sensory, Oleson tackles issues of labor, the environment, craft, and performance with humor, pathos, and intellectual rigor.

Jeanine Oleson is an interdisciplinary artist working with images, materiality and language, which she forms into complex and humorous objects, images, videos, and performances. She attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Rutgers University, and Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Oleson has exhibited and performed at various national and international venues. She published two books about performance projects in 2012, “What?” and “The Greater New York Smudge Cleanse.” She is also a lead collaborator since 2013 on a participatory project, “Photo Requests from Solitary” that provides images to people held in solitary confinement and supports advocacy efforts to end the practice in US prisons. Oleson teaches at Rutgers University and lives in Brooklyn, NY.

Kitchen Broadcast is a livestream performance series launched in spring 2020, featuring artists from The Kitchen community on Tuesdays & Thursdays at 6pm EDT. For more information about the series, visit The Kitchen online.