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UMFA to host Low Lives 4. Networked Performance Festival

Salt Lake City, UT – The Utah Museum of Fine Arts (UMFA) at the University of Utah is pleased to announce its participation as the global presenting venue for Low Lives 4. This two-day festival features more than 50 live performance-based artworks from around the world, which are transmitted over the web and projected in real-time to 25 international venues.


Objectification Michelle Ellsworth

The UMFA will host Low Lives curator, Jorge Rojas, in the G. W. Anderson Family Great Hall as he conducts the event on Friday, April 27 from 6:30 to 9:30 p.m. and Saturday, April 28 from 1:00 to 4:00 p.m. Contemporary artist Michelle Ellsworth, recent recipient of the 2011 USA Knight Fellow award, will perform two live “performance sculptures” from her Please Consider series at the UMFA on Friday at 9:00 p.m. and Saturday at 3:30 p.m. More than 50 additional performances by international artists will be streamed online and projected onto a screen at the UMFA.

Low Lives 4 is open to the public and included with general UMFA admission.

About Low Lives
Founded in 2009 by artist and independent curator Jorge Rojas, the annual Low Lives festival highlights works that critically investigate, challenge, and extend the potential of networked performance practices. The project celebrates the transmission of ideas beyond geographical and cultural borders, offering global audiences the opportunity to consider live performance in both physical and virtual space.

Low Lives provides a new model for efficiently presenting, viewing, and archiving live performance-based art. The annual exhibition embraces low-tech aesthetics, such as low pixel images and muddled sound quality, to emphasize the raw and inquisitive quality of the broadcast and reception of the works.

Low Lives has found new momentum after presenting Low Lives: Occupy! in New York City on March 3, 2012. Low Lives partnered with Occupy with Art and The Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics at NYU to present a one-night-only event of simulcast performances by 36 artists and collectives committed to the Occupy Wall Street movement. The well-received Low Lives Occupy! program offered new perspectives on the Occupy protests and expanded the reach of the movement by broadcasting to an international community.

“Over the past four years Low Lives has developed a platform that invites and enables artists, audiences, and presenting venues to ‘plug in and participate’ from anywhere an internet connection exists,” Rojas explains. “Low Lives is not simply about the presentation of performative gestures at a particular place and time, it is also about exploring the potential of live streaming networks as a creative medium connecting performance artists with audiences around the world.”

Low Lives 4 is co-produced by the Brooklyn-based arts organizations Chez Bushwick (www.chezbushwick.net) and SPREAD ART (www.spreadart.org), and by Colombian artist, Juan Obando (www.juanobando.com).

A live simulcast of the event will be streamed on April 27 and 28 at www.lowlives.net.

2012 Participating Artists
Austin Adkins | Regina Agu | Lindsey Allgood + Amy Luznicky | Emma Alonze | Mauricio Ancalmo | Angela Bartram + Mary O’Neill | Mariane Bourcheix-Laporte | Ruth Vigueras Bravo | Caryana Castillo | Khalil Charif | Matthew Thomas Cianfrani | Gina Cuntstruct | Elwin Cotman | Dance Troupe Practice + Luciana D’Anunciação | Ian Deleon + Kara Stokowski | Stephanie Diamond | Bados Earthling + The Wild Audio Society | Michelle Ellsworth | Ursula Endlicher | Tim Eriksen | Francesca Fini | Les Filles Föllen | Marcel William Foster + Dunstan Matungwa | Future Death Toll | Lawrence Graham-Brown | Alejandro Guzmán | Matt Hawthorn | Joseph Herring | Kanene Holder | James Holland + Alycia Bright Holland | Linda Hutchins | Rima Najdi | Samantha Jones | Igor Josifov | Nathaniel Katz + Valentina Curandi | Elizabeth Leister | Jonathan Lemieux | Gideonsson/Londré | Jonatan Lopez | Tina Mariane Krogh Madsen | Soukei Matsuo | MoTA – Museum of Transitory Art | Nataliya Petkova | Blatta Orientalis | Alexandre Pombo-Mendes | prOphecy sun | Stefan Riebel | Tara Raye Russo | Nuria Guiu Sagarra | Maximiliano Siñani | Jonathan Sutton | Étienne Tremblay-Tardif | Elinor Thompson | Robert Tyree + Andra Rotaru | Marcus Vinícius | A.G. Viva | Alyssa Taylor Wendt | Amelia Winger-Bearskin | Martin Zet

2012 Presenting Partners
Aljira, A Center for Contemporary Art (Newark, New Jersey); Center for Performance Research (CPR) (Brooklyn, New York); Chez Bushwick (Brooklyn, New York); Co-Lab (Austin, Texas); Diaspora Vibe Gallery (Miami, Florida); Fusebox Festival (Austin, Texas); Grace Exhibition Space (Brooklyn, New York); Legion Arts (Cedar Rapids, Iowa); Little Berlin (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania); Living Arts (Tulsa, Oklahoma); Mascher Space Co-op (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania); Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (PICA) (Portland, Oregon); Real Art Ways (Harford, Connecticut); SOMArts (San Francisco, California); Space One Eleven (Birmingham, Alabama): Spread Art (Brooklyn, New York); Utah Museum of Fine Arts (UMFA) (Salt Lake City, Utah); Alice Yard (Port of Spain, Trinidad & Tobago); the temporary space (USA/Japan); Yamaguchi Institute of Contemporary Arts (YICA) (Yamaguchi, Japan); Dimanche Rouge (Paris, France); La Maison des Artistes (Paris, France); Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Bogotá (MAC) (Colombia); At The Vanishing Point (Sydney, Australia); Small Projects (Tromsø, Norway); Ateliers ’89 (Aruba)

About Jorge Rojas
Jorge Rojas is a multidisciplinary artist and curator. He uses traditional and new media, as well as performative elements to investigate communication systems and the effect of technology on artistic production, social structures and communities. Rojas’ work and curatorial projects have been exhibited internationally. In 2009, Rojas founded Low Lives, where he currently serves as director, producer, and curator.

About Michelle Ellsworth
Born in Washington DC and raised in Palo Alto, CA, Michelle Ellsworth makes solo performance work, performable websites, drawings, and videos. She was awarded the USA Artists Knight Fellowship for 2011. She has performed at On The Boards, DiverseWorks, Dance Theater Workshop, Jacob’s Pillow, and Brown University. Her drawings, spreadsheets, and scripts have been published in CHAIN and her screen dances have been seen around Europe and throughout the U.S. Ellsworth is currently working on a 7-inch recording with drummer Sean Meehan. She attended BYU for several years and is the great-great-great-granddaughter of Edmund Lovell Ellsworth, the first hand-cart captain to cross the plains. More information can be found at www.michelleellsworth.com.

About the Utah Museum of Fine Arts
The Utah Museum of Fine Arts (UMFA) is located on the University of Utah campus in the Marcia and John Price Museum Building at 410 Campus Center Drive. As Utah’s premier visual arts resource, the UMFA inspires visitors of all ages to discover meaningful connections with the world of art. The UMFA’s permanent collection features some 18,000 works, and special exhibitions make each visit a new experience. General admission is $7 adults, $5 youth and seniors, free for U of U students/staff/faculty, UMFA members, higher education students in Utah, and children under six years old. Free admission is offered the first Wednesday and third Saturday of each month thanks to the Salt Lake County Zoo, Arts, and Parks fund. Museum hours are Tuesday–Friday: 10 a.m.–5 p.m.; Wednesdays 10 a.m.–8 p.m.; Weekends, 11 a.m.–5 p.m.; closed Mondays and holidays. For more information call (801) 581-7332 or visit www.umfa.utah.edu. The Utah Museum of Fine Arts was also the Low Lives global presenting venue in 2011.

For more information, please visit www.lowlives.net.

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