Sandrine Schaefer Curatorial

Miller & Shellabarger explore the dynamics of love and loss through performance pieces that emphasize the artistic process as a metaphor for the cycles of life and death, of connection and separation. The Chicago-based couple has been creating collaborative works since they began their relationship 20 years ago, bringing together their respective fascinations with the body to produce performance art that speaks to universal themes in relationships in a distinctly physical way.
In the piece they created fro LONG TERM, Miller and Shellabarger repeatedly  sewed themselves together and cut themselves apart over a four hour duration in a public park.  

Miller & Shellabarger are a 2009 recipient of the Peter S. Reed Foundation Grant, 2008 recipient of an Artadia Award, and a 2007 recipient of a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation award. Their work is in the collections of the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art and the National Gallery of Canada in Ontario. The couple had as solo show at the Museum of Contemporary art in Chicago. In 2010 they showed a major selection of work at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Portland, Maine, participated in the Time-Based Arts (TBA) festival in Portland, Oregon and a solo show in 2011 at the Illinois State University Galleries in Normal, Illinois. Their work has been written about in Artforum.com, Art & Auction, Frieze, Artnet, The Art Newspaper, Flash Art, Art Pulse TimeOut Chicago, and the Chicago Sun-Times. Dutes Miller and Stan Shellabarger also maintain separate artistic practices. They live and work in Chicago. 

JV = Jeff Huckleberry and Vela Phelan have been collaborating since 1998. They are connected by a surreal network of intuition, which guides them into the unknown. Jeff and Vela preselect the objects needed to activate the moment and all other is left to chance. 

For LONG TERM, JV presented their piece, Tactic.

ROOMS (US) is the performance art/installation husband and wife team of Marrakesh and Todd Frugia. Both have extensive backgrounds in video production and live theatre, having each received an MFA in Theatre Performance from Ohio University. Since it’s creation, ROOMS has produced over 50 performance and video installations, including their first commissioned work performed in early 2012.  For LONG TERM, ROOMS presented, Ritual No. 1: COUNTING BIRDS which features a group of participants simultaneously vocalizing a self- referential mantra. For three hours they count in ascending order — using each number's value (in seconds) to determine the length of the vocal expression of the very same number i.e. "ONE" in one second, "TWO" in two seconds..."THIRTY" in 30 seconds, etc. It doesn't take long to reach a point of vocal abstraction.

ROOMS has shown work at the Indianapolis Fringe Festival, Collaborations Festival at the Bailiwick Theater (Chicago), Apollo Studio Theater (Chicago), Ohio University, Colorado College, Lamar University (Texas), Defibrillator Performance Art Gallery (Chicago), OUT OF SITE Festival (Chicago) as well as in their own studio as part of the Chicago Arts District in the Pilsen neighborhood. 

For the last fourteen years Paul Couillard and Ed Johnson have worked together on the series "Duorama". Duorama explores notions of relationship. Playful, beguiling and often minimalist, these pieces draw on collaborative and competitive tensions that underlie all partnerships. Responding to site and examining cultural attitudes toward male intimacy are key elements of Duorama. Recurring themes revolve around shifting interpretations of what is political and what is personal. Many of the works can be read in terms of the current social and political climate surrounding gay culture, offering askance references to issues such as gay marriage, HIV-status, and portrayals of gay culture.

For LONG TERM, Duorama created a moving, interactive piece in the public spaces surrounding Hub 14 over the duration of 4 hours.  

To date, 114 Duorama performances have been presented at galleries, festivals and various events in Canada, France, Poland, Croatia, Ukraine, Belarus, Finland, Germany, Switzerland, Spain, the USA, Singapore, Ireland and the UK.

German artist Verena Stenke and Venetian artist and writer Andrea Pagnes, have been working together since 2006 as VestAndPage, generating art in the mediums of live performance, filmmaking and writing, and through independent curatorship. For LONG-TERM, Stenke and Pagnes began their  performance cycle "Dyad" programmed over two evenings, looking into the danger of dichotomy, attachments to dualism, and the paradox of Ego. 

VestAndPage's works have been presented widely across Europe, Asia, the Americas and Africa. Their practice is process-led and examines the fragility of the individual within different social or environmental spheres. Exploring what, as human beings, we still have to offer, VestAndPage question our existence within a humanity characterized by social exclusion and global atrocities. Animated by a nomadic, confrontational spirit, they apply the themes of acceptance, resistance, crisis and endurance with a poetic bodily approach to art practice. They are the independent curatorial force behind projects such as the "Venice International Performance Art Week" and the global art initiative "FRAGILE global performance chain journey". Between 2010-2012, VestAndPage produced the art film trilogy "sin∞fin The Movie" in Antarctica, India, Kashmir, Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego, combining the ephemeral art form of performance with filmmaking.