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For immediate release Public Art Fund presents? Clara Williams A Collaboration with BAM Local Development Corporation
September 13 - October 26, 2003 New York, NY - This September, the third-story windows of a vacant former state office building in Fort Greene, Brooklyn will come to life with artist Clara Williams' dramatic multimedia installation, The Price (Giving in Gets You Nowhere). This mechanized marionette production, a project of the Public Art Fund, will be installed in the upper windows of the building façade of 80 Arts, a renovation project of the BAM Local Development Corporation. Like an elaborate cuckoo clock, Williams' artwork will surprise passersby by activating once an hour, on the hour, to enact a three-character scene loosely drawn from The Price, a 1968 play by Arthur Miller that takes place in the attic of a New York brownstone. For The Price (Giving in Gets You Nowhere), Clara Williams' narrative is inspired by the second act of Miller's play. At the top of every hour, three life-size marionettes exit 80 Arts through the building's third-floor windows onto platforms and act out an 8-minute automated sequence. Using only body language, props, lighting, and music playing on a Victrola - and dispensing altogether with dialogue - Williams' installation conveys the basic narrative in a manner that is at once minimal and necessarily melodramatic. The three marionette characters, each nearly six feet tall, publicly act out a private drama about family, emotional debts, social class, and life's decisions, employing an economy of gestures to reveal basic character traits and conflicts. Set in New York, Arthur Miller's The Price centers on the troubled reunion of two estranged brothers, Victor and Walter, who meet in the attic of their deceased father's brownstone building one week before its slated demolition. During their sixteen years apart, the two brothers have followed different paths: Walter left home early to become a successful doctor. Victor, the older of the two, stayed at home to care for their father, and later settled for a blue-collar job as a police sergeant instead of pursuing his own career in medicine. As the play begins, Victor and his wife, Esther, arrive to haggle with an antiques dealer over the price for an attic's worth of furniture and long-unused family treasures. When Walter arrives - late and unannounced - the already-tense financial transaction builds into an airing of decades of unresolved family conflict. In Williams' installation, the action begins with an argumentative conversation between the couple, Victor and Esther, and continues onto their reunion with - and ultimate confrontation with - Victor's long-lost brother. Located at the corner of Hanson Place and South Portland Avenue in Fort Greene, 80 Arts is a once-derelict building that is undergoing renovations by the BAM Local Development Corporation to transform it into affordable office space for non-profit arts organizations. As a building in transition, this once-derelict structure is an apt site for Williams' piece, which poignantly displays a slice of family life brought on by similar, if fictional, urban architectural flux. The Price (Giving in Gets You Nowhere) grows out Williams' interest in using existent architectural and communal spaces as a site for understated interventions that blend into their environment and are only located through careful observation. In her 2002 solo show, "Something Like This", Williams used elements of dioramas, panoramas, and stage sets to create a winter scene that blended into the white walls of the gallery. In 2000, she created deserving and undeserving, a foam-and-plywood replica of a mother-and-child statue installed alongside the original in the parking lot of a New Haven Catholic church. Her previous works have also investigated the nature of theater: In Man with Bags, an ongoing piece based on playwright Eugene Ionesco's absurdist classic, Williams has made a series of sculptural props and storyboards to explore the notion that a play can be boiled down to its most basic but peripheral elements. Clara Williams' The Price (Giving in Gets You Nowhere) can be seen Tuesday - Sunday, on the hour every hour 11am - 8pm from September 13 - October 26. 80 Arts is located at 80 Hanson Place at the corner of South Portland Avenue (one block south of the intersection of South Portland Avenue and Fulton Street). Subway: C to Lafayette Avenue; 2, 3, 4, 5, M, N, R, Q, W to Atlantic Avenue-Pacific Street. ABOUT THE ARTIST ABOUT IN THE PUBLIC REALM ABOUT PUBLIC ART FUND The Public Art Fund is a non-profit arts organization supported by generous contributions from individuals, foundations, and corporations, and with public funds from The New York State Council on the Arts, a State Agency, and the City of New York Department of Cultural Affairs. ABOUT 80 ARTS ABOUT BAM LOCAL DEVELOPMENT CORPORATION # # # Contact:
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