Was, Is, Will Be is Leon’s 3rd Annual Performance Art Series, broadcasting remotely throughout the month of May, 2020, and during the stay-at-home/safer-at-home orders of Governor Polis and Mayor Hancock.
Artists were provided an honorarium to create a work of pre-recorded video or prepare a performance for live streaming.
As the various works are premiered on Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram, they will be added to this gallery.
Featured Artists and Broadcast Dates:
Phil Cordelli and Sueyeun Jeliette Lee – TEDDYSNORKEL – May 7th
Brenton Weyi – A Verse for Humanity – Creative Words of Connection and Introspection – May 8th
Joshua Ware – DETH LIGHGHT IX: DNCE DNCE!!! – May 14th
Michael John McKee – Exercising – May 15th
Sarah Touslee and Tyson Bennet – Wait Here – May 21st
Tobias Fike and Matthew Harris – Confined – May 28th
Fike & Harris – 78,267 ft Apart
Tobias Fike and Matthew Harris bring us the fifth performance in Leon’s 3rd Annual Performance Art Series, reuniting again, after their wildly successful “Pop” performance from our first series in 2018.
Their video, “78,267 ft Apart” will be broadcast via Facebook, Youtube, and Instagram.
To make donations or send tips to the artists you can use Venmo: @Tobias-Fike
Statement: Fike and Harris connect through Zoom, and it isn’t always pretty.
Bio:
Collaborating since 2010, Tobias Fike and Matthew Harris have dragged each other across the desert, wrestled each other’s shadows, and tried to catch glass objects while blindfolded. Their work addresses the everyday difficulties of human relationships, often using humor and irony to highlight the real struggles involved in negotiating difficult situations. They have exhibited widely, including at the Fonlad Digital Arts Festival (Coimbra, Portugal), the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art (Boulder, CO), and the David B. Smith Gallery (Denver,CO). In 2013, they performed live for the opening of Denver’s Biennial of the Americas First Draft exhibition where they tested the collision of beach balls at high speeds.
Their performance video, “Food Fight” is in the Kadist Art Foundations, Video Americas collection and was recently shown in Shanghai, China as part of that collection.
TEDDYSNORKEL – Phil Cordelli and Sueyeun Juliette Lee
Artist Statement – We will manifest and consume messages from other forms of life here on earth to prepare our bodies as channels to the future.
Artist Bios – Phil Cordelli is a poet and farmer just outside the city of Denver.
Sueyeun Juliette Lee grew up three miles from the CIA. Find her at silentbroadcast.com
To make donations to the artists you can send $ via Venmo: @sjuliettelee
A Verse for Humanity: Creative Words of Connection and Introspection – Brenton Weyi
In this video, Brenton shares some poetry, stories, a song from his musical, and ends with improvised verse informed by the audience. Central to all his performances is a sense of building community and human bridges, which is especially vital during this most disjointed time.
To make donations to the artist you can send $ via Venmo: @Brenton-Weyi
DETH LIGHGHT IX: DNCE DNCE!!!
Joshua Ware is an artist and writer living in Denver, Colorado.
To make donations to the artists you can send $ via Paypal:
buildingthefactory@hotmail.com
DETH LIGHGHT IX: The Illumination of Nothingness
1. During the autumn of 1965, Aram Saroyan composed lighght. An audience, he said, should “see rather than read” the poem—for it is “sculptural” as much as textual.
2. When we say light, we pass through gh silently.
2. When we say lighght, we, too, pass through ghgh silently; but we are aware of silence because silence becomes seen.
3. Silence is the sound of nothing; but ghgh is variation producing pause. DETH LIGHGHT, too, is a kind of pause.
4. If “habit is the great deadener,” then DETH LIGHGHT is the great leveler.
5. Americans do American things: families, houses, careers, and cars; vacations and 401Ks.
6. When we die, our names will be forgotten. No 401K will save us.
7. The dead do not worry about American things.
8. We become nothing in our unnamedness, regardless of our station.
9. Sappho is nothing now but fragments; her contemporaries lost forever.
10. If we are to be forgotten, then dance inside the DETH LIGHGHT. But gracefully so.
11. DETH LIGHGHT IX: DNCE DNCE!!! is a dance of insignificance before we disappear.
12. DETH LIGHGHT IX: DNCE DNCE!!! sways with the apocalypse.
13. DETH LIGHGHT IX: DNCE DNCE!!! says “I am this body who dances horribly in heavy boots.”
14. DETH LIGHGHT IX: DNCE DNCE!!! explores public spaces rendered empty by disease.
15. DETH LIGHGHT IX: DNCE DNCE!!! explores intimacy in a time of social distancing and PPE.
16. DETH LIGHGHT IX: DNCE DNCE!!! partakes in our own decay.
17. DETH LIGHGHT IX: DNCE DNCE!!! is a dilettante’s film—and unashamedly so.
18. DETH LIGHGHT IX: DNCE DNCE!!! is a love song for everyone.
19. DETH LIGHGHT IX: DNCE DNCE!!! is a prayer to no one.
20. DETH LIGHGHT is the illumination of nothingness.
Exercising – by Michael John McKee
Here is the fourth broadcast in Leon’s 3rd Annual Performance Art Series, Was, Is, Will Be.
In “Exercising,” Michael explores the intersection of endurance, minimalism, and indeterminacy through the human body, percussion, and technology, paralleling a daily life during stay-at-home orders.
Bio – Michael John McKee is a musician and sound artist. Under the moniker Helicopter Copter, Michael produces sound-forward mixed media, including projects like experimental music video collaborations, sound design and incidental music for theatre, tongue-in-cheek compositions, wind chime sound installations, and alt music performances.
To make donations or send tips to the artist use Venmo – @micjohmck