On Jan. 27 for their opening reception, LIZN’BOW will take possession of two-thirds of Tempus and Cunsthaus with a retrospective of pieces created in past workshops (and they have a vast history, working with the Bass Museum, Breakthrough Miami Outreach, and the Institute of Contemporary Art Miami) in the project space, and even a Talk Show hosted by the kids of Stepping Stones.
Curiosity gets me every time, so I spoke with LIZN’BOW to learn how they run their workshops and some details of the Talk Show performance/event.
Caitlin Albritton: Could you tell me a bit about how you run your New Media workshops with the kids?
Bow Tie: Our workshops focus on providing space for people to form nuanced and expanded ideas of identity, representation, power, and possibility. We often times start off with a simple prompt, like asking the students to write down something that is not true, and then to draw the world as if it were true. Using this as a point of departure, we begin challenging the students to reinterpret the function of ordinary objects, play on the boundaries of gender and respectability with their fashion presentation, and become comfortable self-identifying in nonconforming ways. From here, we take all of the content and ideas they've generated and edit it into new mixed-realities, portraits, commercials, etc. that themselves critique the mediums they're portraying, and play with the students' ideas of their own mediated image.
Liz Ferrer: The kids from Stepping Stones are amazing. They are so funny, clever, and inspiring to work with.
CA: Access to new media is rare for any classroom that’s not higher education, making this opportunity especially valuable. How might this be implemented in the future for inserting more arts (including new media, but we’ll take pretty much any art at this point) into education?
BT: New media, performance art, and other forms of contemporary art are often times made to feel exclusive by their carefully guarded associations to advanced academics and high-brow art culture. We feel that these mediums can both help us deconstruct the boundaries of who we are, and begin to establish spaces that are more free. Kids are usually already better performance artists than most adults, for example, in that they tend to be more flexible to changes in perspective and open to a fluidity of meaning.
To incorporate this more into the education system, we might first have to convince the litigators of education that people having more open-minds and learning how to deconstruct historically enforced narratives are actually good things. The problem as we know is, this often comes into direct opposition with corporate interests and the interests of other powerful cultural institutions. A good start would be if we could get K-12 art programs to focus less on conventional aesthetics, and more on performance, action and creative thinking.
CA: Could you give us a little insight on your Talk Show event coming up Jan. 27? It sounds intriguing!
BT: We always choose a mainstream cultural format as starting point. For the Talk Show, we will be constructing a live studio set with green screens, monitors, camera feeds, a mix of pre-recorded segments, live performances, and graphical interludes that combine content from our workshops with the kids here in Tampa. Of course, this isn't going to be a conventional talk show. Things are going to get aesthetically weird, and perhaps also charmingly amateur.
This article appears in Jan 25 – Feb 1, 2018.
