58th International Venice Biennale, Venice Italy
May 11, 2019 - ongoing
This Is Not A Picnic is a narrative action piece, staged in various locations throughout the city of Venice during the 58th International Venice Biennale. The piece offers itself as a kind of magic carpet, vehicle, or moveable feast upon which to enact the playful line between theatre and reality.
The project underlines the artist’s shifting positions as artist, consumer, participant, and traveler, and reveals the painting as a kind of transitional object which extends the artist’s sense of possibility. Eating, Sleeping, Presenting, and Infiltrating become some of the actions the artist shares with the painting, as the process moves throughout the day and throughout the city.
In the interim, the artist senses the presence of the Venice Biennale as a kind of un-consumable feast, and offers a series of actions which aim for digestion and even of transubstantiation of the spirit of Art: A Purification (exhibition on a laundry line), A Staging (presentation with a posed audience), A Supplication (artistic idol workshop), A Reordering (retelling of events), A Picnic (without food, upon a painting, within a gallery), and an Undercover Rebirth; (under a bedspread, in Dreams, In a Venetian House).
This Is Not A Picnic, courtesy Picnic Pavilion at 58th International Venice Biennale May 2019