Blowout! DC Performance Art Festival, Hillyer Art Space, June 16, 2012

Patricia Brace - When you stop moving they will kill you

When you stop moving they will kill you is a performance by New York based artist Patricia Brace that talks about the artist’s own impulse to run away from her problems, only to recreate them in the next location.  In the process of running the artist tricks herself into believing that the next location/vocation will be better, establishing a pattern of unrealistic expectations and severe disappointments.

In her BLOWOUT performance Brace will move around the courtyard of Hillyer Art Space for the entirety of the festival.  With no destination, or end in sight, the artist’s constant movement suggests the need to stay in motion as a form of avoidance.

Brace’s work blurs the boundaries between her work and her life, leaving it unclear as to whether the audience is seeing the artist, or the person, the act, or the real thing.  Brace’s constant motion (avoidance of reality based systems), suggests that the artist has chosen to live in a fantasy and it is only when she stops that the veil of the fantasy will fail.

Patricia performed Double Fantasy, a two-person performance work that uses video, singing, and dancing to illuminate moments of miscommunication at Soapbox in October, 2011.