What's Up - Your guide to what's happening in Fayetteville, AR this week!
Issue link: https://www.epageflip.net/i/1238910
APRIL 26-MAY 2, 2020 WHAT'S UP! 3 Into The Unknown JOCELYN MURPHY NWA Democrat-Gazette T here is a well-known understanding within the art field, explains Pia Agrawal, that the work is only complete once an audience takes it in. For performance- or time-based work, though, that relationship is a little different. Enter the artist residency, where sometimes, like at Bentonville multidisciplinary arts venue the Momentary, artists can continue to develop a project in a setting where the audience can react in real time. At least, that was the idea. The Momentary was supposed to continue its already extant residency program by physically hosting artists in the newly opened space for the first time beginning this month. "We're reframing a lot," Agrawal admits. Agrawal is the Momentary's performing arts curator and reveals that, in spite of the quarantines, shutdowns and cancellations of our post-covid-19 world, Momentary staff members were anxious to maintain the momentum of both the venue's Feb. 22 opening and the scheduled artists' already extensive labor. "Quite frankly," she goes on, "we're reframing our relationship with art, with artists, how to interact with this work, how to have conversations. So that thought went into how we were shifting this residency. We wanted to still give communities around Northwest Arkansas — but with the virtual realm, really anywhere — the opportunity to understand the kind of work that's being made by our artists." The result is a virtual residency with artists Nick Vaughan and Jake Margolin as they progress the Arkansas piece of their prodigious installation series, "50 STATES." "We're all going into this idea of virtual residency asking a lot of questions about, like, what is valuable in a virtual residency, when typically so much of what is being done in a residency is about that on-the- ground, in-person communication," muses Margolin. "It's definitely a bit of an experiment," his husband and artistic partner Vaughan chimes in. "How does this work? And what information do we need to transmit, and how do we do that? This will be a learning process for all of us, but how do we operate Artists, residency explore present, past connections Nick Vaughan (left) and husband and artistic partner Jake Margolin were set to be the first artists in the Momentary's residency schedule to physically work from the newly opened venue. Since the closure, the pair have been working closely with Momentary staff to arrange an effective and engaging virtual residency. (Courtesy Photo/Janice Rubin) BENTONVILLE in such a way that we can actually communicate something of the story and the place and the feel to somebody who's not there?" What was originally scheduled to be a three- or four-week residency — involving bringing other collaborators from across the country to the Momentary plus work-in- progress showings — will now be a one-week virtual experience. Agrawal and other organizers on the presenter's side are asking a lot of the same questions as the artists, she shares. How can online tools and the virtual sphere be used to connect the audience to the material in a meaningful way? Distilling the experience to one week will give both sides the chance to "interrogate the process," Vaughan says, and evaluate not only how the situation works in its present state, but then how that progress can be translated to an in-person model down the road. "We always work with these histories that have a way of wriggling out of what you want them to be, and you always kind of have to follow them wherever they lead," Vaughan says of each installation. "So there's something kind of poetically wonderful about the process, in this case, doing the same thing. It will be interesting to see what the structural shift in [the piece's] development actually means on the back end in terms of how it informs what the content becomes, or the structure of the performance." GO ONLINE! '50 STATES: ARKANSAS' To hear more about the Arkansas piece, listen to a podcast with Jocelyn Murphy at nwadg.com/podcast. See 50 States Page 4