KANSAS CITY, MO.- The diverse group of performance video artworks presented in InsideOut collectively inscribes varying intensities of psychological and provocative effects within and on individual physical bodies as sites of sensual and material expression. Individual performers/subjects characterized by multiplicities of identities morph and transform their subjectivities and event-spaces through disruptive re-contextualizing effects. Hallucinatory layered and aggregate identities become sites of narrativity and modulating displacement that exceed their boundaries and turn our expectations upside down and inside out.

Several works presented appear to be kinds of metaperformance as a generative process that evokes unexpected and unrestrained modes of performance as opposed to habitual and conformist actions and reactions to diverse social circumstances and environmental contexts. These works are more like the Happenings of the mid-twentieth century where unconventional aspects of performance spilled out into public space and artists exploring the conflation of life and art staged performance events in non-art locations while also disrupting established art contexts.

All of these video works engage the shell/form of performance gesture while expanding the potential of performative experience that affects us in new ways. Artists are responding critically and creatively with a new political awareness to global media representation and expression of the subject/viewer becoming performer through interventions into the dimensions of mixed realities. They are actuators setting unexpected expressions and feelings in motion, overflowing traditional or conventional social circumstances such as family, occupations and social spaces while simultaneously opening new experiential domains of self-creation. These works create transformative aspects of affective experiences that empower the performer while undermining the working contexts and exceeding the constraints of established expectations for the performer/subject. Larger than life, the empowered performer/subject defies gravity becoming playful and childlike. The psychological boundaries of encounter and confrontation that so often preserve the observed performer as subject and object are becoming heated up or slowed down and forming new aggregate organisms with unlimited potential. These works often transgress the expected behaviors of anthropological and social subjects while celebrating the body’s sexuality and creative potential for opening new experimental aesthetic experiences and modes for performance.