New York

From April to June 2007, Anne undertook an international residency at the Franklin Furnace Archive, New York supported by Arts Council England. At the end of the fellowship, Anne exhibited collaborative work made with other artists during the residency at the Space Gallery, NYC under the title Conversation Portraits. The artists included Lenora Champagne, Diego Cortez, Mary Beth Edelson, Karen Finley, Donna Henes, Kim Jones, Harry Kipper, Nina Sobell and Fiona Templeton.

During the private view she made a performance Vexations with artist Nina Sobell, which remained as an installation. The score for the work, which Nina followed as a video, was an early work of Anne’s in which she played Satie’s Vexations whilst white paint dripped and poured onto the piano key board, changing and silencing the notes. During the performance, Anne unfurled ribbon over the keyboard muffling notes and adding whirling sounds to the score.

Exhibition notes:

Conversation Portraits
The work in this show The Future of the History has been produced during Anne Bean’s 3 month fellowship at Franklin Furnace Archives and arose from several strands of thought whilst exploring the archives. These thoughts asked questions about collaboration, documentation, spontaneity and the original radical stance of performance art

Collaboration: What is the space between us? How can we enter that most profoundly? Can we produce a third strong unique ‘being’ between ourselves?

Spontaneity: Can spontaneous action break down some defenses and make it more possible to venture into unknown territory?

Documentation: Is a painting or sculpture inevitably its own document: an archiving of its live process? Was performance art initially a radical response in order to share the live and ditch the archive?

A reflection on these thoughts, amongst many, in relation to the original radical stance of performance art in which the work was simultaneously created and witnessed led to this experiment called Conversation Portraits.

Eighteenth-century British painters used the word “Conversation Pieces,” sometimes called “Conversation Portraits”, to describe informal group portraits as well as views of daily life. Anne Bean invited 9 artists, all of whom had been involved in the Franklin Furnace performance programme, to have a dialogue with her about their work and together to try and ‘capture’ this interaction within the time frame of the conversation, using a mix of media as part of the visual conversation..

SPACE GALLERY

Front St at the corner of Beekman St.

“Conversation Portraits.” Anne Bean, first international fellow with Franklin Furnace Archives had visualised dialogues with Paul Burwell, Lenora Champagne, Diego Cortez, Mary Beth Edelson, Karen Finley,  Donna Henes, Kim Jones, Harry Kipper, Nina Sobell and Fiona Templeton, which initiated multi- media works.

June 22 through July 15, 2007