ABOUT

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‘Untitled’ is a piece that plays on the classic contemporary art troupe of leaving works of art titleless. However, for the protagonists of this project, that has always been their fate. The Barber Institute of Fine Art commissioned LYNNEBEC to take over the galleries and create a piece responding to an exhibition about the exploitation of animals in art. 

 

The portrayal of animals in classical art traditions has always been slapped with a heavy human metaphor/anthropomorphic focus. The exhibition that inspired the piece, focused heavily on the servitude of animals during the industrial revolution, and their untold work that helped progress human advancement. 

 

We approached creation using 3 examples of animal exploitation:

 

• Horse racing 

• Fox hunting

• Intensive farming 

 

We explored the space looking at what the gallery space offered to support the movement quality, and identifying how the gallery was similarly littered with aesthetic or decorative features, that depicted animals in metaphorical symbols of beauty and power. 

 

Incorporating these elements we choreographed 3 sections that travelled across the gallery spaces, that could be active during the Barber Lates event for which this piece formed the only performative part. 

 

The performers moved around the space with abstract animalistic qualities and would settle in the space around the decorative animalistic elements previously identified. 

 

The climax of the piece was a horse race in the main hall. After racing the horses to exhaustion it seamlessly transitioned into Dolly Parton 9-5, where the performers broke into pairs with a jive inspired choreography about intensive dairy farming. This melted into fox hunting waltz choreography, to Ella Fitzgerald's Got You Under My Skin. The foxes are slowly picked off one by one whilst still trying to maintain a facade of calm. Finally, the animals returned to the theatre from which they had emerged, contained in a space of metaphor and meaning, unable to escape the human eye.

 

This was created and performed in January 2019.