Carrie Yury (feat. Will and Paul Oldham, Colin Gagon, and Richard Schuler) Mutter [2005]

Back in June, the California-based photographer and Dolce Volante alum Carrie Yury displayed 700 free copies of her latest solo outing, the Mutter EP, in light-box towers at LA Design Center, and the exhibition itself seems to serve as an interesting bit of context to the incredibly engaging six-song disc. The installation's five CD towers are all clean, well-lighted lines, the mechanical tones of blacks and whites complemented by the blank steel-gray slate of the shrink-wrapped CD cover, a possible homage to the Table of the Elements label. In photographs posted on Yury's website, this cold and almost sterile precision is amplified by an absence of viewers and participants. Except for a lone woman in black coat and jeans passing through one frame, the displayed discs exist as pieces of art without audience, documents forged without the smudged and imperfect wonder of human fingerprints. The disc couldn't be more the opposite.

Recorded in Shelbyville, Kentucky in May, the disc is tender and fragile in the most human of ways — a 23-minute collection of folk-pop gems that are as a beautiful as they are beautifully understated. Far from the cold and well-plotted precision of the LA Design Center installation, the disc is warm and disarming and clearly benefits from the comforting charms of contributors Will and Paul Oldham, Colin Gagon, and Richard Schuler. While Schuler's able drum work may be best known from King Kong and the early days of Louisville punk heroes Squirrel Bait, it's the musical context brought to the table by Gagon and the Oldhams that may be most identifiable by listeners, a colloquial kind of folk-pop that may have defined itself best on post-Palace outings like Joya or Ease Down The Road.

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Mutter [2005]

Photography : (My) Performance Anxiety

Late last year I did a performance piece with three other women. We danced around on stage wearing dirndls, doing the Chicken Dance, then peed on stage. The only way I got the courage to perform was by doing the whole thing wearing an animal mask. I was traumatized by the experience, not least because I was the only one of the four dancers who DIDN’T get performance anxiety (i.e. I was the only one who was able to pee; the other women just squatted in vain).

The series of drawings “(My) Performance Anxiety” is about my conflicted relationship to performance art: on the one hand, it terrifies me (both as performer and as spectator), and on the other, I have an incredible amount of respect for and am inspired by performance artists. In the drawings I project my shame and anxiety about performance art on to the images of famous feminist performance artists by placing animal masks on their faces. The simple, gestural drawings are a way of expressing or working through both my reverence for the artists I depict, and my feelings of personal inadequacy for not being brave enough to perform without wearing a mask. The colorful, playful mask neutralizes or makes comical work that, in its original context, was revolutionary, confrontational, and irreverent, thereby underscoring the importance of the women’s bare faces encountering and interacting with the audience.

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ENJOY!