Artists: Neil Beloufa, Lucinda Childs with Sol LeWitt and Philip Glass, Charles Gaines, David Haxton, Channa Horwitz, Xylor Jane, Rudolf Laban, Dashiell Manley, Debra McCall, Rebecca Morris, Bruce Nauman, Kelly Nipper, Heather Rowe, Emily Roysdon, Kathleen Ryan, and Emmett Williams.

Performing the Grid is an exhibition that brings together an intergenerational group of artists and cultural producers that utilize the grid as a performative strategy to examine, challenge and position philosophical, political, social, domestic, corporeal, and mythical perspectives. Rosalind Kraus famously wrote that the grid “functions to declare the modernity of modern art” in her 1979 essay, Grids. The grid has played a historical role in conceptual and minimalist art practices and continues to motivate and engage artists today. As we delve deeper into technology, a culture of images, violence, and surveillance, how do we locate presence inside of the grid? How is the self presented within the grid? Is intimacy visible inside the grid? The included works in Performing the Grid access, address, reject and evoke the grid using video, performance, documentation, sound, sculpture, painting and installation. At times the grid is a means of tracing movement, a tool for documenting the passage of time and arranging visual texts and compositions. In other works, the grid is conjured as a blatant motif, a utopian design, and theatrical prop. From Debra McCall’s geometric re-performances of Oskar Schlemmer’s Bauhaus dances, to Bruce Nauman’s meditative studio walks and Channa Horwitz’s sound motion compositions to Heather Rowe’s film-inspired sculptures, the grid takes on new meaning and new movement.