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Image: Courtesy of The Green-Wood Historic Fund Collections.
Graveyard Shift: Kim Brandt
For the second commission of Graveyard Shift, Kim Brandt will present a new performance Untitled (Green-Wood), her first work created for—and presented in—an outdoor space. Performers will move throughout Cedar Dell, a circular landscape, as they build and collapse mobile structures, developing a temporal installation that is a rumination on circles, spheres, spirals and loops. Untitled (Green-Wood) explores how site informs the body’s relationship to motion in a continuation of Brandt’s interest in the body’s symbolic and realistic relationship to gravity as well as motion’s persistent drive towards inertia. In seeking new ways of experiencing our relationships to one another, Untitled (Green-Wood) softens the spatial and kinetic relationships between the performer and viewer, stillness and motion, the end and the beginning.
Kim Brandt has presented her work in New York City at The Shed (2019), MoMA/PS1 (2018), SculptureCenter (2017), Abrons Arts Center (2017), Pioneer Works (2016), Artists Space (2015), AVA Gallery (2015), and The Kitchen (2014). Her work has been supported by a NYFA/NYSCA Fellowship in Interdisciplinary Arts (2018), a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists Award (2017), Mertz Gilmore Foundation (2016–2018), The Jerome Foundation Travel & Study Grant (2016), and Brooklyn Arts Council (2016). She has received residencies at MoMA/PS1 (2017–2018), Djerassi (2018), Movement Research (2016–2018), Bogliasco Foundation (2016), and Issue Project Room (2015). She has performed in the work of Bruce Nauman, Ryan McNamara, and Walter Dundervill, and her writing and interviews have appeared in Artforum, Bomb Magazine, Girls Like Us, and Sound American. Brandt received a BA from Hampshire College and a MFA in Sculpture from Tyler School of Art.
About the Series
American cemeteries of the nineteenth century were public parks that once saw visitors picnicking on the lawns, strolling down meandering paths, and socializing together as families. In the last century, however, these spaces have become more utilitarian in nature and lacking public engagement beyond funerals and grieving. Graveyard Shift proposes a new way of interacting with the space of the cemetery by activating it through sight, sound, and movement. This performance program features commissions taking place at and in collaboration with Brooklyn’s historic Green-Wood Cemetery, where the storied landscape and monuments are used as reference points for producing site-specific works.
About The Green-Wood Cemetery
Founded in 1838 as one of America’s first rural cemeteries, the Green-Wood Cemetery soon developed an international reputation for its magnificent beauty and became the fashionable place to be buried. By 1860, it was attracting 500,000 visitors a year, rivaling Niagara Falls as the country’s greatest tourist attraction. This popularity helped inspire the creation of public parks, including New York City’s Central and Prospect Parks. Green-Wood’s diverse set of public programs include arts and cultural events, twilight tours, workforce development programs in masonry restoration, a new range of Social Studies-aligned school programs, environmental justice workshops focused on street trees, exhibitions in our Fort Hamilton gatehouse and much more. For more information, please visit www.green-wood.com.