KAREN FINLEY'S SEXT ME IF YOU CAN DEBUTS AT MIAMI PROJECT IN DECEMBER
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE – Contact COAGULA CURATORIAL at (424) 2-COAGULA for interview opportunities and more images.
KAREN FINLEY will be performing SEXT ME IF YOU CAN at The Miami Project Art Fair, December 7-9 in Coagula Curatorial’s booth (#901).
Exhibitionist art collectors looking for portraits of their privates can discreetly send images to one of America’s most controversial and widely known artists when visiting the Miami art fairs this December. Karen Finley will be painting images that art fair-goers sext to her (“sexting” is sending intimate images from a cellphone camera to a friend via text messaging software).
Be it one “big” part of you, a lover on the couch, a hooker on the clock or your birthday suit as nature delivered it, the chance to be an exhibitionist and be memorialized in paint by a living legend of contemporary art has arrived in Karen Finley’s SEXT ME IF YOU CAN.
This interactive painting performance will feature an on-site art studio where Ms Finley will be receiving sexted images on her cellphone from anonymous art collectors looking to transform their most private poses into commissioned fine art paintings. Visitors to the fair can privately purchase a code and phone number to sext Ms Finley at the Coagula Curatorial booth.
In this studio at Coagula Curatorial’s booth in Miami Project, the artist will be painting on canvas her interpretations of the images she receives. The work will be on display at the booth as will her process of revealing what a private exhibitionist wants her (and the denizens of the Miami fairs) to see.
The phenomena of sexting blurs traditional distinctions of intimacy. The exhibitionist urge of the sender challenges the receiver not to show the sent image to anyone else. Or does it? Do those sexting pictures of their privates secretly hope to appear nude to all the world? Traditional definitions of intimacy are obsolete under the specter of technology and power relationships are in flux when freedom and control are stored on a microchip.
Karen Finley’s SEXT ME IF YOU CAN revels in the chaos of new forms of transgression available to the general public reviving the maligned medium of painting as a potent and vital tool of social change and its documentation.
In an era of social intervention dominating the art dialogue, Finley boldly returns the act of painting and the artist’s commitment to studio practice to the center of this technologically-enabled social intervention.
As a pioneer of performance art but schooled in painting, drawing and other fine art mediums, Finley insists on returning the nature of performance out of the traditional theater, away from the purely experiential and into a definite act of art-making. In her fifth decade as a leading performance artist she is determined to bring the art back into performance.
ARTIST BIO:
Karen Finley is an artist, performer and author. Born in Chicago she first took life drawing at the Chicago Art Institute as a teen and received her MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute. She works in a variety of mediums such as installation, video, performance, public art, visual art, music and literature. She has performed and exhibited internationally. Finley is also interested in freedom of expression concerns, visual culture and art education and lectures and gives workshops widely. The author of 8 books including her latest work of creative nonfiction; Reality Shows published by Feminist Press 2011. She is the recipient of many awards and grants including a Guggenheim Fellowship. She is an arts professor in art and public policy at New York University
ABOUT THE GALLERY: Coagula Curatorial is located on the Chung King Road row of contemporary art galleries in Downtown L.A.’s historic Chinatown neighborhood. Founded on the twentieth anniversary of the underground Los Angeles publication Coagula Art Journal, the gallery’s program is an array of new art by emerging and established artists.
ABOUT THE ART FAIR: Miami Project debuts with 65 galleries in a 65,000-square-foot space in Miami proper, a short drive from Art Basel Miami Beach in the Wynward District at NE 1st Ave and NE 30th St, next to Art-Miami.