2.18.2010

Pick of the Day: One + The Other



















If you've checked out Michelle Provost's show Selling Out (DogBlog) at the Dunlop Art Gallery you might remember an Egon Schiele action figure on the one wall. Born in Austria in 1890, Schiele was a protege of Austrian Symbolist painter Gustav Klimt who, prior to his death in 1918 at age 28 from the Spanish Flu, attracted both accolades and condemnation (for drawings of teenage girls that townsfolk where he lived regarded as pornographic).

I mention Schiele now because this contemporary dance performance by Vancouver-based artists Justine A. Chambers and Deanna Peters is apparently inspired in good part by images taken from his drawings and paintings with the goal, says advance publicity, of offering "an otherworldly look behind faces we show."

That's not much to go on, I know. But there is certainly plenty of fertile ground to be explored in the disjunction that exists in most people's lives between their public persona and personal reality. I'm looking forward to seeing which pathways Chambers and Peters chose to explore.

One + The Other runs tonight and Friday at 8 p.m. and Saturday at 2 p.m. at New Dance Horizons (2207 Harvey St., $15.)