Exhibition Description

 

BRB/Total Id Pigs
Works by Ian Swanson
Saturday, July 30, 2011

View images from the exhibit

Ian Swanson’s one night site-specific performance, BRB/Total Id Pigs, explores the relationship between ordinary objects and the ideas, people, places and events attached to them. Borrowing elements of various ritual paradigms, the performance is designed to remind us how commerce and ephemera shape our reality, asking us to consider how we define ourselves, and how history defines us.

Gallery visitors are strongly encouraged, although not required, to bring with them an object which holds sentimental or nostalgic value of a particular size; preferably of or under what could fit in the palm of a single hand. Material value is not a consideration. They will be asked to donate these objects for inclusion in the performance. They will not be returned. Instructions will be provided to attendees upon arrival.

In BRB/Total Id Pigs, Swanson explores again a common thread that connects his work in all media: the use of his creative process to investigate his own personal and cultural identity, layering and deconstructing to expose the “tenuous relationship between what we reveal and what remains unseen,” inviting viewers to embark on their own explorations of existing references and conventions.