SOUTH BEND.- The South Bend Regional Museum of Art presents the exhibit Perform/Install through September 24. Performance orients itself towards the implication and inclusion of the audience. Whether improvisational music, spoken word, or a one act play, performative works posit a temporal exchange between artist and audience. The unfolding of this exchange creates a dialogue that is greater than the sum of its parts. Similarly, installation works transform space and situate us not as viewers looking at a work from the outside, but rather as participants navigating through the work's center. In both cases the piece is not complete without the inclusion and participation of the viewer. Perform/Install embraces the active role of the viewer by fusing a series of performance based events with installations by Liz Miller and artist team Jody Boyer and Russ Nordman. For both the performances and installations, the viewer is the final key element, the bridge that closes the gap between just looking at and plunging in.

The organizer of Perform/Install, SBRMA curator Jason Lahr, states, "Ideally, we can have the experience that we want with a work of art. We can enter that point where the world falls away and we find ourselves immersed in the world of a photograph, painting, or sculpture. Or we have that moment where we're transported to the potter's wheel or easel and see the work through the eyes of the artist. Too often though, our ability to enter into an experience with a painting, photograph, or sculpture is limited. We're distracted by the chaos of our lives or the unfamiliarity of an image or process. In that moment, the distance between our looking and what we're looking at becomes palpable. The thread of the dialogue is lost. In Perform/Install, the grouping of performance and installation seeks to reduce our disconnectedness as viewers by situating us at the core of the work's formation."

The large-scale installation work of artist Liz Miller is constrained by neither space nor lack of the imagination. Miller's vividly drawn, painted, and collaged artworks expand like tentacles across the length of the viewing space, climbing and creeping across the walls and ceiling. A bright array of nontraditional art materials such as foam and felt give depth to planar surfaces as she emphasizes the ambiguous play between structure and chaos. For Miller, "Bold, synthetic color speaks to our appetite for sensory overload, exploring the territory between that which is seductive and that which is sickening. In contrast to the hard, smooth surfaces of the computer monitor and television screen, my work offers a tactile map of contemporary life through the materials employed."

Paramnesia represents a large-scale collaboration by interdisciplinary artists Jody Boyer and Russ Nordman. Like amnesia, paramnesia is a real medical condition, where the afflicted confuse reverie with reality and remain unable to distinguish between what exists and what is imagined. But unlike amnesia, people who experience paramnesia remember their experiences, conflating fact and fantasy until the two become immutably intertwined. Using a model train mounted with a miniature video camera, Boyer and Nordman guide their audience through a landscape of miniature forests and figurines. Across the gallery, live footage of the mounted camera flickers in the dimly lit gallery. A chair, an antique iron bed and dresser are suspended askew from the gallery ceiling. Along the gallery walls, fleeting film footage culled from old home movies, grainy images reminiscent of a bygone era and the nostalgia of simpler times. Together, the pieces evoke an eerie recollection of dreams and occurrences that the viewer isn't quite sure to happened to him, or not.