Artists & Projects Directory
Dean Moss/Gametophyte Inc.
Nameless forest is a multidisciplinary performance work conceived by Dean Moss and developed in collaboration with contemporary Korean sculptor, installation artist and poet, Sungmyung Chun, who creates unsettling figurative installations. The project explores subjectivity and the nature of perception by both translating Chun's ‘scenes' into live action, and questioning the act of translation itself. Structured in three parts, the work will feature fragments of war zone reportage by photojournalist Mike Kamber, mirror and neon lighting effects from abstract artist Gandalf Gavan, and an original score by environmental and found sound composer Stephen Vitiello. Nameless forest will be produced in partnership with MAPP International Productions, and is scheduled to premiere at The Kitchen in 2011.
The project
continues Moss' formal investigations of both the dialogue between self and
other, and the role of the audience in the performance experience. This
exploration was begun in his 2005 collaboration with visual artist Laylah Ali,
titled figures on a field. Based on her provocatively violent series of
"greenheads" paintings, the work included a docent led tour of the dance during
its performance.The juxtaposition intimated not only the difference between
gallery and performance space but, was unusually precise in its articulation of
the political and the aesthetic meanings of ‘frame'.
His most
recent work, Kisaeng becomes you (2008), a collaboration with Korean
traditional dance choreographer Yoon Jin Kim, explored contemporary parallels
found in the poems and lives of Korea's
artist courtesans of the Joseon Dynasty called kisaeng. Moss, conceiving
the audience as the kisaeng, asked volunteers to train, dress and speak the
poems on stage. Their participation redefined the inherent "exotic other"
of the Korean cast, while articulating a sense of isolation and vulnerability
unattainable in traditional audience/performer relationships. Through his
practice and with his collaborators, Moss has created immersive precisely
layered dramas by exploring the role of the audience within the performance
experience. With Nameless forest Moss looks to build upon this process
through its design which references, among other things, the traditional Korean
circular performance space, and through its performance, which explores
virtuosity as a platform for audience interaction. Nameless forest, in its
completion will examine our perception of self, from the internal subjective
narrative, through external societal conflict, to abstraction and nothingness.