JEALOUSY
1224 W Loyola Ave, Chicago IL
April 5, 2021 - April 11, 2021
This video is an artifact of the hour-long performance of the same name that premiered at HAIR+NAILS (Minneapolis) in Summer 2019. Audiences strolled the gallery installed with a strapping-tape-and-light-walled room-within-a-room designed by Ryan Fontaine and Heidi Eckwall within which HIJACK (Kristin Van Loon & Arwen Wilder) danced. This dance was visible via multiple live-feed video views in basement and backroom installations or to the naked eye via peepholes or barely-there blurriness through the walls. The blacked-out backroom view was on a tiny tv that shared the feed of three CCTV cameras on a switcher. The tv shared space with shelves of candle-lit donuts with frosting the same shocking pink as the mainroom installation and the costumes. The room smelled of soil and sugar. The switching CCTV camera live-feed was recorded on vhs.
JEALOUSY will be projected each afternoon and evening, visible directly from the street at 1224 W Loyola Ave while the space itself remains closed to the public. This work is being shared as part of Movement Studies – a new series of screenings, performance, research, workshops, and reading groups created by artists in Chicagoland and across the Great Lakes region investigating social and environmental transitions.
HIJACK is the Minneapolis-based choreographic collaboration of Kristin Van Loon and Arwen Wilder. Over the last 26 years they have created over 100 dances and performed in venues ranging from proscenium to barely-legal. HIJACK manipulates context by employing a site-specific approach to every performance and toying with audiences' expectations. HIJACK has performed in New York (at DTW, PS122, HERE ArtCenter, Catch/Movement Research Festival, La Mama, Dixon Place, Chocolate Factory), Japan, Russia, Central America, Ottawa, Chicago, Colorado, New Orleans, Seattle, Philadelphia, San Francisco, at Fuse Box Festival in Austin Texas, and Bates Dance Festival in Maine and Seattle Festival of Dance Improvisation. In 2013, Walker Art Center commissioned “redundant, ready, reading, radish, Red Eye” to celebrate twenty years of HIJACK and Contact Quarterly published the chapbook “Passing for Dance: A HIJACK Reader”. For more information, please visit mcknightdancechoreo.org/hijack2.
Heidi Eckwall designs lighting for dance, theater and performance. Sometimes she tours in the US and abroad, sometimes she works and teaches at Colorado College, sometimes she works biking distance from the house she shares with Arwen Wilder and their two children. Recent projects include #PUNK100%POP*N!GGA with Nora Chipaumire, Birds of the Future with Charles Campbell and Momentum: New Dance Works (J. H. Shui Xiān, Herbert Johnson III, Leslie Parker, Jonathan van Arneman).
Ryan Fontaine is a visual artist, musician, and co-director of HAIRandNAILS Contemporary Art with Kristin Van Loon. Ryan makes paintings, sculptures and multi-media installations using a wide range of materials, synthetic/industrial as well as natural, including living plants. The work is primarily concerned with the relationship between object and information. For more information, please visit ryanfontaine.com.