Self, Labor, Reciprocity
Performed Installation 2015

Hannah Reeves and Valerie Wedel

The two desks, two chairs, two doors, two "walls" comprise a "room" for each artist. We each metaphorically sit in our respective studio rooms, making little things. One artist stitches her own long hairs into small voile fabric forms while the other felts circles of her animals' hair with her own hair. The little things we each make for this piece represent repetition and sacrifice - we literally put ourselves into the process by incorporating our hair, and we repeatedly make the same little forms.

In this performance we literally offer the little objects to each other. The front door and front stoop construction double as an altar and veil stand-in, so that leaving the little furry things on each other's step is like making an offering/sacrifice. We each collect the offering the other has made, and bring it into our own room, and stitch it into our own wall. This is symbolic of art-making. One creates, pouring oneself into the process and the product, and then releases it and offers it to the world for consumption and interpretation.

After making our little objects at our desks, offering the objects to each other, receiving the other's work and stitching it to our walls, we then leave the space in mid-process, as if we've stepped out of the studio before the whole repetitive process has ended. The installation is residual of the performance. The piece is somewhat different each time we install it, because our little objects accumulate with each performance. 

The installation, itself a collaboration, represents art-making and its inherent collaborative, sacrificial, personal, and repetitive qualities.