Press for Nearly staitionary at Hudson hall

The Brooklyn Rail

June 2022

By Susan Yung

An exhibition of costumes by Barbara Kilpatrick set the stage for choreography by Silas Riener and Rashaun Mitchell at Hudson Hall. Hudson Hall, built in the 1850s as Hudson’s first city hall, was designed to function as a Columbia County gathering place, with a post office, bank, lecture hall, and gallery. It continues to draw the public, albeit with performances in its splendid hall, recently renovated to incorporate modern amenities such as a/c and an elevator. With a flexible, gymnasium-like floor plus a raised proscenium stage, it hosts forward-looking events which eschew traditional models. Continue Reading

New Yorker

May 16, 2022

By Brian Seibert

The visual artist Barbara Kilpatrick has a long history with dance, designing exquisitely eccentric costumes and sets for the choreographer Vicky Shick, among others. “Nearly Stationary,” at Hudson Hall, in Hudson, N.Y., is an installation of Kilpatrick’s photographs, sculptures, and costumes. Silas Riener and Rashaun Mitchell, who are exquisite and eccentric themselves, dance a new work in response to the exhibit amid some of its costumes, as the Four Parts Quartet plays John Cage’s “String Quartet in Four Parts.”

Times Union Review

May 6, 2022

By Tresca Weinstein

When she was working at a museum many years ago, artist Barbara Kilpatrick learned a troubling statistic: The average amount of time a viewer spends looking at a work of art is just 10 seconds. That number stayed with her, and eventually inspired her to begin making art outside the museum or gallery box, specifically costumes and sets within which dance and performance could take place.

“The idea that I could make an object that would be integrated in the presentation of a visual event, and time would be spent looking at it, that I could somehow alter viewers’ perceptions, there was a beauty about that,” the artist reflected in a recent interview. “People were looking longer, but also not being engaged in the materialization of purchasing an object or venerating it because it was in a museum.”

For “Nearly Stationary,” at Hudson Hall through June 12, Kilpatrick has created an installation of “live-art objects,” as she calls them, and invited dancers to enter into and respond to them. The multi-floor exhibition, which opens this weekend, features costumes, drawings, photography and performance ephemera, which collectively serve as the basis for a new dance work by Rashaun Mitchell and Silas Riener. Set to John Cage’s “String Quartet in Four Parts,” the piece will be premiered on May 14 in Hudson Hall’s 1855 theater, with a dozen performances scheduled throughout the show’s run.

“Our contribution is specifically designed to exist within the framework of Barbara’s installation,” the dancer/choreographers wrote in a combined email interview. “The dance weaves among the costumes, and the costumes are in some cases moved or manipulated by the dance. The grand setting of the performance hall and courtly elements of the costumes influence spatial and tonal responses within the dance as well.”

The pair’s movement language was influenced by the colors and textures of the objects, as well as the techniques Kilpatrick uses to weave, print and dye the garments, draped on dress forms she cast herself. Her materials range from fairy lights to caution tape, and conjure up multiple eras in the history of both art and fashion.

“Costumes are stand-ins for me and my art-making process, so oftentimes they will reflect either historic or contemporary art ideas I’m working through, that are embedded in the costume,” she explained.

A doublet is crafted with steel washers like ancient armor; a flowing gown is encased in a twisting wire cage. For other costumes, Kilpatrick pieced together photographs like patchwork, transformed recycled plastic bags into a tutu, and made fabric by printing photographs of her old dolls, discovered in an attic, on cotton and linen. Her creations blur the lines between soft and hard, stillness and motion, art and functionality.

“I always saw them as sculpture but wondered if they were elevated enough to be art objects,” Kilpatrick said of her work. “To have an object whose provenance and purpose is uncertain and build into it a certain kind of ambivalence, as unsettling as it is, it’s very interesting to live in that uncertainty.”

Early in her career, Kilpatrick teamed up with Vicky Shick, then a dancer with the Trisha Brown Company. Their 20 years of creative partnership included the Bessie Award–winning “Undoing,” in which the inanimate elements—movable screens, low platforms, a large bowl, paper costumes—were as fundamental to the mood and patterns as the dancers themselves.

“I would be reacting to certain ideas that got developed in our performances, and alternately working on ideas that influenced our choreography,” Kilpatrick recalled. “It was a back and forth between my independent, solo studio life and the performative life.”

She drew inspiration for both process and product from Robert Rauschenberg’s set pieces and John Cage’s scores for Merce Cunningham’s dances; those collaborations produced what Kilpatrick described as “a new hybrid art form” that shifted the relationships between dance, music, costumes and sets. While her work with Mitchell and Riener took place almost entirely at a distance, due to pandemic-related restrictions and geography, the result will be a co-creation in the same tradition.

“What I love about collaboration is that the ego gets released,” Kilpatrick said. “You’re not thinking about yourself as much as you are the larger object at hand, and that’s very freeing.”