Media Release

Lawrence, KS, March 8, 2011 – The Spencer Museum of Art will become an experimental performance laboratory for a day as performance artist Ernesto Pujol conceptualizes the representation of gaze—the artist as the embodiment of our human gaze. Pujol stages meditative performances that involve subtle gesture, such as walking, pausing, looking, tracing, and drawing.

For the Spencer he has created Visitation, a site-specific performance based on the history of painting, as an act of copying the entire contents on view within the Museum on this given day, creating a painterly time capsule, shadow-collecting all visual experience. The event is free and open to the public.

After positioning himself as a human sculpture in the entrance to the Spencer, Pujol will spring to life and engage in a silent institutional intervention, gentle and laborious, for an entire uninterrupted day, from opening to closing time. His durational piece will leave a trail of drawings, left on view all day, allowing the audience to follow his pilgrimage through the galleries. This is a six-hour-long work that can be imitated by Museum visitors, who can come and go, drawing with Pujol, ultimately ending in a humble exit after the Spencer is formally flooded with paper.

About The Artist

Ernesto Pujol is a contemporary performance artist with a site-specific public practice. He is interested in performance as the portraiture of a place and a people. Pujol is currently a graduate advisor at the Parsons School of Design, and is the founder and director of The Field School project and the new UteHaus performance group. His writings can be found in Awake: Buddha Mind in Contemporary Art, and Learning Mind: Experience Into Art, edited by Mary Jane Jacob. Born in Cuba and raised in Puerto Rico, the artist works between New York and the West/Midwest.

Links

• www.ernestopujol.org
• www.utehaus.org
• www.dreamingkansas.com
• www.thefieldschoolproject.org
• www.awaitinginsaltlakecity.com