Physical Education: History is a Hole
keyon gaskin | Allie Hankins | Takahiro Yamamoto | Lu Yim
Exhibition Dates: April 11 – May 5, 2018
Linfield Gallery is pleased to present History is a Hole, an exhibition and performance featuring Portland-based artist group Physical Education (PE). The project is a continuation of a chain-curation performance series first mounted at PNCA’s Center for Contemporary Art and Culture in 2017. For this exhibition, PE has extended an invitation to artists/students at Linfield College to contribute to the making of a multimedia installation that will ultimately arrive at a performance on April 11th.
History is a Hole uses a series of texts as a genesis for their collaborators to reflect on and create new work. These texts, drawn from politics, scientific research, and science fiction, explore a range of topics including the application of new technology to encode and store data within DNA and the algorithms used by social media companies to block some forms of speech but not others.
The content of these readings are reflected in the form of the exhibition. Information is being transferred between writers, artists, students, and collaborators, resulting in works that contain many authors and unpredictable results. This project, which is the culmination of a semester-long residency with PE, embodies a vision of Linfield Gallery as a laboratory, where artists can take risks and experiment. The public is invited to witness both the process and the evolving results of the partnership.
Additional support for this exhibition comes from the Yamhill County Cultural Coalition, which includes funding from the Oregon Cultural Trust and the Oregon Community Foundation.
STATEMENT FROM THE ARTISTS
history is a hole is a series of performances and performative actions.
history is a hole
moves towards and away from the action of language of image and the image of language through action
many hands creating and created by one to the other, and other to the other
what comes from the passing of? the sharing of? the physicality of? within the architecture of?
what do we? how do we?
uphold
the body in a storm
beholden
recentering decentering
a database of { }
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Physical Education began as an intimate reading group centered around critically engaging with performance, dance, media, theory and ideas amongst artists keyon gaskin, Allie Hankins, Takahiro Yamamoto, and Lu Yim. The group opened up to the community and started to host and organize reading groups and performance events when they landed their first Precipice Fund grant in 2015. Since then they have collaborated with S1, Holocene, and Short Space.
They curated history is a hole in collaboration with HQ Objective and PNCA, and hosted a reading group with de:canon project (2017). Most recently, PE put on SAY WHEN, their first mini-festival which curated international and Portland-based performers and interactive media artists. They are two–time recipients of the Precipice Fund (2015, 2017). They were artists-in-residence at PNCA’s Center for Contemporary Art & Culture(2016-17). PE has toured as a group to Minneapolis and San Francisco and were visiting artists in Garrick Imatani’s Invisible Weather at Southern Oregon University in Ashland, Oregon.
They do not identify as a collective and have yet to find a fitting word other than Physical Education to describe what they are.
For more information about PE please visit:
www.physicaleducation.life
www.alliehankins.com
www.takahiroyamamoto.com
www.lu-yim.com