“Words manifest in action. Our actions are ‘still performances’ of thoughts.”
Catalog from exhibitions at the MIT List Visual Arts Center in 1989 and the Anderson Gallery at Virginia Commonwealth University in 1990 with an essay by John P. Jacob. Still Performances is a continuation of Gerlovina and Gerlovin’s collaborative exploration of language and ritual, mixing performance, sculpture, and photography. The 15 images reproduced here feature portraits of the artists with words and symbols painted on their faces, each with illuminating titles and textual captions that expand upon the theme poetically, posing open-ended questions and provocative truths on the nature of being and reality. Pre-Christian symbology, alchemical formulae, the Cabbalistic Tree of Life, Pythagorean mathematics, and other esoterica abound in the striking black and white portraits.
