A new site-based work of movement and social activism for glo and the Hudgens Center.

OPENING Saturday August 11 at 2pm

At the Hudgens Center, Lauri Stallings is taking over the Fowler Gallery and Kistner Atrium. What used to be an exhibition area for paintings and sculpture will become a gathering space and a place for movement. rather than some things appearing to rise up soft to your chest and a whole lotta’ mercy highlights the architectural peculiarities of the hudgens while at the same time underscoring its role as a community center. The artist offers this site-based work as a means of moving and surviving between multiple conditions and contexts. The title is meant to offer the visitor immediate relief from the effort to have to see and make associations, while considering what ways art can help us provide our own answers in these tough times.

With its numerous live elements, the project invites people 1 to 100 years old to respond freely and openly in a museum that is filled with oscillating rhythms. With this work, Stallings continues research in choreography as a tool box devised to bring together things that normally never meet. Her materials have been chosen for their emotional power they give off. The artist is motivated by a wish to connect to things outside what we can see and understand, both the strange and the stranger, and inspire a society. Five topics throughout the project that she feels are important: mounds and curves as portions in topography of the female body; color, which in this country has always been associated with social and cultural background; movement as a visual practice; empathy, as a new form of currency and exchange, and meeting beautiful strangers.

glo female moving artists phaemonae Brooks, Virginia Coleman, Christina Kelly, Mandi Mpezo, Mary Jane Pennington, Rebekah Pleasant, Mechelle Tunstall and Cara Watkins, will live in the museum, They will get settled in, and activate a map of choreographies  with the public during regular museum hours. Stallings is really always trying to develop direct engagement with the public, even if it means working outside the confines of the museum. A series of nighttime social performances, shops, and talks will take, offering museum extended hours. a migration of exhibition materials will travel off-site and activate Historic downtown Duluth. The work evolves as its own platform on multiple levels and as a continuous project altered daily for the public to be free.