Artist's Talk Suzanne Bocanegra

A story about a priest, an artist, and a young girl in Pasadena, Texas. Part artist’s talk, part performance, part cultural history, part sound installation.

New York–based artist Suzanne Bocanegra talks about her work, channeled through Paul Lazar, an actor long associated with New York's legendary Wooster Group. Together (sort of) they tell a tale incorporating Elvis, abstract expressionism, the Pope, astronauts, the Singing Nun and obviously, a witch.

Cosponsored by Ohio State’s Department of Art.

Keep reading for more about the artist and complete image captions. Suzanne Bocanegra is an artist living and working in New York City. A recipient of the Rome Prize, she has received grants from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, the Tiffany Foundation, the Joan Mitchell Foundation, and the New York Foundation for the Arts. Her recent work involves large-scale performance and installation, frequently translating two-dimensional information, images, and ideas from the past into three-dimensional scenarios for staging, movement, ballet, and music. Her piece Rerememberer, for example, used the weaving instructions for a scrap of antique Danish peasant fabric as a template for an evening-length theatrical performance that included an amplified loom, an accordion virtuoso, a DJ, and an orchestra of fifty volunteers playing violin who had been taught to play only one hour before the performance. Rerememberer was premiered at the Judson Memorial Church in New York City in January 2010 and travelled to Copenhagen in June 2010.

Bocanegra’s work has been seen in exhibitions in the United States and abroad, in such venues as the Serpentine Gallery in London, the Hayward Gallery, the Armand Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, and the Fabric Workshop in Philadelphia. Her theatrical, video, and film work has been presented at the Bang on Can Festival, the New Haven Festival of Art and Ideas, the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival, and as part of the Wordless Music series in New York. A major exhibition of Bocanegra’s work opened at the Tang Museum in July 2010.

Paul Lazar cofounded Big Dance Theater with Annie-B Parson in 1990 and since then has continuously created dance/theater works with the company. For Big Dance he directed Fassbiner's Bremen Freedom, Odon Van Horvath's Don Juan Comes Back from the War, and Tristan Tzara's The Gas Heart, which toured to festivals in France and Italy. Big Dance’s work Another Telepathic opened at Dance Theater Workshop in New York and toward to the STUC festival in Leuven, Belgium, and the company’s production of Mac Wellman's Girl Gone opened at The Kitchen in New York and toured to On the Boards in Seattle, UCLA, and Kamplagle Theater in Hamburg, Germany. Lazar and Parson also codirected Shunkin which opened at The Kitchen in New York and toured to the Yerba Buena Theater in San Francisco and are currently working on dance/theater adaptation of Euripedes' Alkestis that will open at the National Theatre in Paris and make its New York premiere at the Next Wave Festival in the fall of 2011. He has performed in numerous Big Dance pieces including Plan B and The Other Here. The company’s most recent work, Comme Toujour Here I Stand, has been performed throughout France as well as at The Kitchen.

Lazar is an associate member of The Wooster Group, with whom he has appeared in Brace Up!, Emperor Jones, The Hairy Ape, and North Atlantic. He has also had roles in Richard Maxwell's Cowboys and Indians at Soho Rep, Mud at Signature Theater, and Young Jean Lee's Lear at Soho Rep. He has appeared in the films Silence of the Lambs, The Host, Beloved, Lorenzo’s Oil, and Philadelphia, as well as in television and commercials. Lazar currently teaches acting and theater-related courses at New York University and has taught at Rutgers, Barnard, and the William Esper Studio.

Image captions:
(2)Suzanne Bocanegra
All the Petals from Jan Brueghel the Elder’s Flowers in a Ceramic Vase, 1620, 2005
gouache, watercolor, beeswax on paper with fabric and pins
Image courtesy of the artist

(3)Suzanne Bocanegra
Color Chart, 2008
mixed media installation
Image courtesy of the artist