Speaking Ritual,
Reading Body:
Elijah Burgher and Dave McKenzie

Art is a mouth-process that speaks a language-material. Dave McKenzie and Elijah Burgher utilize their likenesses and bodies to speak to the power of the interior/exterior creation of identity and agency. Through sculpture and performance, Dave asks us to examine the relationship of the private and public persona to contemporary culture and our sense of self. Elijah binds the act and performance of drawing to the embodiment of desire and the powerful potential of interpersonal connection. For both Dave and Elijah, language as it is written and spoken, ritual understood as the magical and mundane, and the self as corpus, mentis, and animae are all intrinsically self/same. Dave and Elijah met at Skowhegan in 2011.

The conversation at The Drawing Center coincides with Action + Object + Exchange, the first Open Session exhibition, with artists Eleanor Aldrich, Derek Dunlop, Heather Hart, Yara Pina, Andrew Ross, Lauren Seiden, and Barbara Weissberger. Open Sessions is a two­ year exhibition platform for artists to find new approaches for contextualizing and exhibiting their work, through conversation, public programs, and collaborative gallery installations. Each artist in Action + Object + Exchange reveals a transformative process through the work’s end result: images become objects, drawings become sculptural, symbols become concrete.