Sharon Hayes, In the Near Future, New York, 2005, still from slide
installation. Courtesy of the New Museum.

Sharon Hayes: “An Evening of Images and Ideas”
New Museum - 235 Bowery, New York NY
7pm, 10 January 2008
$Museum Admission (12)

This Thursday artist Sharon Hayes presents an evening of "images and ideas" at the New Museum to parallel her performance and exhibition of I march in the parade of liberty, but as long as I love you I'm not free. The title of the piece is a borrowed Bob Dylan lyric and a fine example of Hayes's practice. In her performances and media works, Hayes often dislodges historical speech and text from inert archives or collective social memory to bring them back into temporary and emphasized circulation. The humanity of these works, something that is immediately apparent when seeing Hayes perform, prevents them from becoming anything that is overly dry or formally stiff. Hayes seems to pour herself into her art, and isn't afraid to step outside of the gallery or museum, that safe place where art spectatorship and practice is constituted and reinforced. In September 2007, for instance, the artist performed Everything Else Has Failed! Don't You Think It's Time For Love?, a public week-long lunch-hour series of readings from a set of anonymous love letters on the corner of a busy midtown block. Performing in office slacks and a tucked blue sweater, Hayes seems as if she could have been any one of the many office-bound people who stopped to observe her, as she spoke with a hushed intensity into a single microphone and amplifier. Hayes here brought a private discourse into the a public space, as if it was a conversation collectively overheard, explicit in its intimacy but opaque in its context and the identity of the speaker(s).

Hayes has been performing I March... throughout the month of December, and one performance on 12 January remains. See New Museum website for details.