We have been working collaboratively for five years and have recently begun teaching in the Art & Technology Department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. We work primarily at the interface of the body and the digital, most often in live and online performance.
From December 2005 – May 2008, we performed being: paul and kate, constructing ourselves as a scientist and a philosopher focused on influencing personal identity through the isolation and control of fundamental daily variables. It was during this time that we began to think of our work in terms of “perpetual performance,” as we were directly engaging people in a variety of public settings including an evangelical church, a public library, a contemporary art gallery and our neighborhood streets.
From May 2008 – May 2009, we performed the New American Cowboy Project under the names Beauregard and Lily Mae Sage, a construction that assumed the outward appearance of an American icon: the cowboy. Using our bodies as catalysts, we soon found ourselves regularly engaged in conversations about America: what it means to be patriotic, what the cowboy as symbol represents, what we as Americans must do to transition successfully and meaningfully into the future.
During this time, we lived illegally and without privacy in a 200 square foot space at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. We were literally performing for an audience (some aware and others unaware) at all times. This continued to push our ideas about identity, perpetual performance, and social sculpture as experimental mechanisms within our art/life. In August 2009, we entered/opened Fishbowl, an experimental, live/work project space located in a storefront of the Tri-Taylor neighborhood of Chicago. We are currently performing an ongoing live work entitled Apprehending the Everyday, where the hours of our daily activities (eating breakfast, taking a nap, etc.) are posted and each of our actions are available for public observation and consumption.
All of these projects rely on an “accidental public” in order to be realized. Our current practice investigates and relays our experiences with public/live art as it concerns issues of identity and truth within the artist-audience relationship, the body as art object, and the practice of art as an exploration and critique of everyday life. We work in a variety of media at the intersections of net.art, video, performance and painting.
