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Pace Live

Choices

Choreographed by Kim Brandt, Staged within Tara Donovan's Stratagems

Performed by Martita Abril, Jessica Cook, Courtney Cooke, Leslie Cuyjet, Ayano Elson, and Lydia Okrent
Saturday, May 4
3 – 6 PM EDT
540 West 25th Street
New York

Event Details:

Choices
Choreographed by Kim Brandt
Staged within Tara Donovan's Stratagems
Saturday, May 4
3 – 6 PM EDT
540 West 25th Street
New York

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Choreographer Kim Brandt’s new work Choices, a performance for six dancers staged within Tara Donovan’s exhibition Stratagems at Pace Gallery in New York, is the culmination of an ongoing dialogue between the two artists over the course of their 12-year friendship.

In her practice, Brandt explores collective actions and counter isolations through a vocabulary of minimal movements that are often pedestrian in nature. By employing an incremental, site-specific, process-oriented approach, she draws our attention to individual bodies as they negotiate space and together create kinetically charged, multi-person atmospheres.

Presented by Pace Live—the gallery’s interdisciplinary platform for performance and live art—Brandt’s newly commissioned work builds over time through a series of movements addressing the spiral as a generative action and embodied experience. These movements resonate with the formal structures of Donovan’s new sculptures made of upcycled CD-ROM discs, drawing out the seemingly sentient nature of each work. As performers and viewers move through Donovan’s installation, shifting optical effects play out across the sculptures’ reflective and refractive surfaces.

Brandt and Donovan share a keen interest in the relationship of the individual to the whole and how aggregative strategies can dramatically reframe our perception. While Donovan invites a type of improvisational choreography as viewers navigate around her works and as the object dissolves into the sum of its parts (used CDs, in the case of Stratagems), Brandt explores how individuals in an ensemble can work both together and alone while guided by collective decision-making.

Tara Donovan Portrait 2018.jpg

Tara Donovan

For over twenty years, Tara Donovan has created large-scale installations, sculptures and drawings that utilize everyday objects to explore the transformative effects of accumulation and aggregation. Known for her commitment to process, she has earned acclaim for her ability to exploit the inherent physical characteristics of an object in order to transform it into works that generate unique perceptual phenomena and atmospheric effects. By identifying and exploiting the usually overlooked physical properties of modest, mass-produced goods, Donovan creates ethereal works that challenge our perceptual habits and preconceptions. The atmospheric effects of her art align her with Light and Space artists, such as Robert Irwin and James Turrell, while her commitment to a laborious and site-responsive methodology links her to Postminimalist and Process artists, especially Eva Hesse, Jackie Winsor, Richard Serra, and Robert Morris.

Learn More

Kim Brandt

Kim Brandt has presented her work at MoMA/PS1, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, SculptureCenter, The Kitchen, ISSUE Project Room, Pioneer Works, Bric, 411 Kent, Artists Space, The Clark, Ceysson & Benetiere, Klaus Von Nichtssagend, and AVA Gallery, among other institutions. Her work has been supported by The Irving Sandler Prize (2023), a Princeton University Hodder Fellowship (2020-2021), a NYFA Fellowship in Interdisciplinary Arts (2018), a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists Award (2017), the Mertz Gilmore Foundation (2016-2018), a Jerome Foundation Travel & Study Grant (2016), and a Brooklyn Arts Fund Grant (2016). She's been an artist in residence at The Chocolate Factory (2024), Triangle (2022–23), Sharpe-Walentas (2021–22), the Chinati Foundation (2019), MoMA/PS1 (2017–18), Djerassi (2018), Movement Research (2021; 2016–18), Bogliasco Foundation (2016), and Issue Project Room (2015). Recent press for Brandt includes reviews and interviews in Artforum, The New York Times, Art in America, Artsy, The Cut, Performa Magazine, BOMB Magazine, Girls Like Us, and Marfa Public Radio, and her writing has been published by the Smithsonian Archives of American Art Journal, the Chinati Foundation, Sound American, and Critical Correspondence. Brandt received an MFA in sculpture from the Tyler School of Art and a BA from Hampshire College.

  • Events — Choices, Choreographed by Kim Brandt, Staged within Tara Donovan's Strategems, May 4, 2024