Operatic Runway was included in The Place Between, a public performance program which took place 28 September 2019 at Schoolhouse Gallery. The program was curated by Kate Stodart as a live accompaniment to A. Bruce's solo exhibition This is a Product of Self Care, and also included the artists Lukas Penney, KANARY and Tallulah Rose in a rotating, overlapping series of performances.
Operatic Runway comprised of a malleable "runway" installation stretched between two pillars of the gallery architecture, including a collection of perishable vessels, and a performance enacted in three distinct acts between the other artists' works.
The piece originated as elements from previously resolved installation and performance, here acting as a site-specific extension of body, action and space. Fluid and innards are exchanged through impermanent vessels between two architectural points: the performing body acts as an agent of both frame and fluid as it enacts this exchange along a set horizontal path, a landscape-like runway which divides the event space and grows continuously stained and decayed. When the installation is not activated by the live performance, the impressions of the body maintains its own agency in the slowly drying residue and in reformations of paper and clay. Through action, not solely defined by the singular body but as a corrosive conduit from point to point, a spatial and temporal configuration is formed which is at once a bridge and a divide.
Statement by curator Kate Stodart:
"Daniel R Marks’ durational performances visualise their ongoing examination into change and manipulation, and the blurring of object and subject. A performance continues for as long as the exchange between material and action or impact can continue, until the point of collapse, stagnation or resolve. In the same way Bruce works steadily on small pieces before building them into a large site-specific installation, Marks’ Operatic Runway, 2019, is a piece comprised of elements from previously resolved installation and performance brought together for a new, site-specific performance. By manipulating and impacting the materials Marks performs with, they are exploring the limits and possibilities of an object’s materiality while examining the connections between their body, their behaviour and the material transformations they witness and manipulate."
