We expect to see this during one of the next three days. It sounds quite interesting.

Allison Smith, 2004
Photo: Bob Braine

DARE # 2: PUBLIC ADDRESS BY ALLISON SMITH

February 15, 16, 17, 2005 - 7.00 pm

An excerpt from the description:

What ever happened to the tradition of the public address? These days, politicians blink and stutter in the face of internationally syndicated broadcasts, whereas in yesteryear elected officials and citizens alike passionately took to the podium to speak their minds, uninhibited by the flack of a televised audience. For Dare #2, artist Allison Smith revives this tradition by giving a public address at Foxy Production. Here, fashioned as a Civil War era recruiting officer, Smith will deliver a call to arms and a call to art - in one.

For the past ten years, Smith has conducted an investigation of the Civil War reenactment community, a group of living historians who re-stage the events of this period as a form of pedagogy and cultural practice. Smith has appropriated the vernacular of this community, using it as an aesthetic palette for sculptural installations that examine the role craft has played in the construction of national identity. Smith has taken a particular interest in the notion of "trench art", or art made by soldiers from the materials of war. Her recent work proposes that since we are living in the context of war, contemporary art can be a form of "trench art", and artists a volunteer militia.

Smith's Public Address for the Dare Series will explore how the Blue and Red states of the last two presidential elections echo the Blue and Grey states of the American Civil War, which similarly divided the U.S. citizenry on geographic, moral and ideological lines. Furthermore, Smith will enlist the Union versus Secession conflict as a metaphor to illuminate tensions within contemporary GLBTQ communities, who find themselves split between mainstream and subcultural identification.

[photo from Foxy Production web site]