Artist:

Brennan Gerard (b.1978, Ohio) and Ryan Kelly (b.1979, Pennsylvania), live and work in Los Angeles and New York

Description:

Modern Living is a series of site-specific performances, videos filmed on location, drawings and performance scores. Each is set in a modernist home, and explores intimacy and domestic space within modernist architecture.The first two took place at the Schindler House in West Hollywood, CA, and The Glass House in New Canaan, CT, in 2016; a third took place at Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye in 2019. The artists are interested in the radicality both of the architecture and the domestic arrangements of the inhabitants.

The artists work with the nine dancers of the L.A. Dance Project, and each event spreads throughout the interior and exterior of each site.

“Structured in chapters, each sited in a modernist home, the project is driven by the question, “what would a home have to look and feel like today to protect and produce intimacies and relations that don’t fit within dominant narratives of family, marriage, or domesticity?” […] Falling in and out of sync, the dancers used the choreography of a “clock”—a series of 12 movements customized for each individual dancer and corresponding to the face of a clock—to generate rhythms, spoken memories, and temporary constellations of duos, trios, and quartets. The group investigated the livability of a queer space—its pleasures, tensions, and impossibilities.” – artists’ website.