The Bridge Club
STILL

Reception & Performance: January 11, 2013  6 – 8pm
On Exhibit through February 16, 2013.

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This collection of photographs connects the spaces, objects and roles occupied by The Bridge Club’s temporal performance works.  Each still offers intimate access to the hypnotic and beguiling worlds they create. Through intentionally isolating and freezing these fleeting moments the artists allow for an alternative experience of their work to draw new connections through time, space and narrative action.

The Bridge Club is a contemporary visual and performance art collaborative consisting of artists Annie Strader, Christine Owen, Emily Bivens and Julie Wills. The Bridge Club’s interdisciplinary installation, video, live performance and digital media works are site- and context- specific, and each work investigates specific local histories, populations, contexts, stereotypes, expectations and conflicts. Performances and installations have taken place in both traditional and nontraditional venues, incorporating and responding to sites such as a hotel room, a city bus or an abandoned storefront in addition to the traditional gallery or museum space.

An anonymous collective persona inhabits each of The Bridge Club’s works, with each member artist donning wigs, shoes and a variety of carefully selected garments that relate directly to the site and concept of a specific work. The collective presence of the four costumed member artists lends an unsettling normative air to odd or uncomfortable situations, while costuming and object choices create a historical ambiguity of era that addresses change and continuity of gender and interpersonal histories, roles, expectations and behaviors.

The Bridge Club’s work has been exhibited at FLUX night 2012, Atlanta, GA;  ‘Off the Strip,’ a new genres festival organized by the Contemporary Arts Center in Las Vegas, NV; ‘Low Lives 2,’ an exhibition of live performance works broadcast via the internet and projected at art museums around the U.S.; Lawndale Art Center, Houston, TX; 1708 Gallery, Richmond, VA; IDEA space, Colorado Springs, CO and SPACES Gallery, Cleveland, OH and they received a Visual Artist Network Residency Grant in 2009. Most recently they received the IDEA fund Grant to support their project “The Trailer” which will launch in Houston in March 2013.