Maya Suess

Maya Suess–assistant curator of Near Sighted-Far Out–lives in Brooklyn, NY. She recently relocated from Vancouver, BC, where she completed a masters degree in Contemporary Performance. Her work uses music, playful text and wry wit to examine issues of identity, sexuality and personal responsibility. She has shown her work in galleries, film festivals, theatres and underground sites in Europe, the United States, Canada and Japan. A recipient of the 2009 New York State Council for the Arts Independent Artist’s Production Grant, keep an eye out for her current work-in-progress It It and the Gimme Box.

Maya writes:

I’ve been having a lot of fun helping Nicole put together the work for this festival. I’m so impressed with the quality and diversity of work that is coming together; I guess I have Nicole and all the artists to thank for that. I’m excited about meeting many of the artists at the screenings next week, as well as getting a glimpse of the performances that are awaiting us.

I began working with video first as a documentary medium for my performances; I came to realize that the key to doing my type of transient work is to DOCUMENT EVERYTHING! There may be something romantic about a gesture that exists merely for its own sake, or an artistic movement that’s gone with the fleeting moment. However, since art is a mode of communication, I have come to believe that documentation is essential. Of course documentation functions as a sort of translation, and can never be expected to take the place of a live event, but it becomes a cipher to be decoded at another time and place. It creates a diaspora.

Near Sighted-Far Out is a reverse gesture to my video-documentation experience. Nicole and I have attempted to take works grounded in the carefully crafted medium of video and make them live. We see the three days of video screenings as events. Adding performances to the viewing space, and introducing a platform for immediate verbal response (as directed by the eminent Uncle Bob) we hope that our audience will be inspired to become active participants in each screening. Thus, seeing dynamically how the diverse videos still speak to one another. Perhaps we will document the interactivity of these events, and the video works will become performances that will turn back into videos and, like the game of broken telephone, we can enjoy searching for what’s lost in translation and revel in new meanings that are created. 

I look forward to seeing all of you there.  Feel free to bring your own documentation device and, most importantly, your critical and playful attention.