The Tenders: 2019 - 2021
The Tenders is an evolving series of live, remote, and hybrid mixed reality performances engaging with the cover song as a means of exploring the ways in which personal and political histories are written, re-written, and written over. The performances juxtapose a complete 3d reproduction of the bedazzled home of self-taught artist Loy Bowlin — "the original rhinestone cowboy," a persona fashioned after a popular 1975 Glen Campbell (cover) song — with 3d scans of the former site of Fort Dearborn, an early American white settler garrison. Placing the flamboyant tradition of the rhinestone cowboy in relation to the history of indigenous genocide and expulsion, The Tenders project seeks to invert and queer colonial narratives lodged deep within the American imaginary.
Blending augmented poetics and virtual environments with movement, costuming, and original music, The Tenders transforms three networked living spaces into portals of discovery through which viewers experience a layering and collapsing of sites, bodies, architectures and temporalities. The project evokes a dazzling camouflage of embodied spaces with a specific attention to the structures of home and fort, and their corresponding liminal openings of window and embrasure. The performance exhaustively explores the affordances of Zoom, defamiliarizing the now-ubiquitous experience of next-generation video conferencing while gesturing towards a future hybrid platform encapsulating live, networked, and site-specific stagings for simultaneously physical and telepresent audiences
The Tenders began as a live work, premiering at the Art Institute of Chicago on February 14, 2020 and was subsequently adapted to the conditions of Covid lockdown, unfolding over a series of approximately 7 iterations.
