ABOUT
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Mercedes Searer is a NYC based movement artist. Identity and our notions of fixedness around it are central to her artistic practice. She invests in the idea that bodies are perpetually engaged in processes of biological, social, and cultural performance. Her work explores the gradation of performativity, playing with the dynamic range between pedestrian to hyperbolic performance states. Manifesting these states and supply shifting between them is the basis of her artistic investigation. Employing various physiological and psychological states, she works with the various rates that performance range can occur in.
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Bodies are perpetually engaged in processes of biological, social, and cultural performance” |
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Mercedes interrogates assumptions around identity. Fueled by the dynamics of the corporeal body and its dramaturgy, her practice recognizes that we are trapped in limited bodies by our habitual movements and stories. She challenges these forms through their donning and un-working, believing that radically inhabiting the body leads to social reform.
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Upcoming/Ongoing
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FLESHy/ 2021
FLESHy, an in-process collaboration with Sonia Lopes Soares looks at the organic conditions of the body and altered states of being. Whose Eyes I AM / 20219
Whose Eyes I Am, an autobiographical research into childhood, memory, and transcendence. In this piece Mercedes Searer journeys through different landscapes and moments in time to evoke a deeply personal piece. rēkənˈteks(t)SH(əw)əˌlīz,/ 2019
rēkənˈteks(t)SH(əw)əˌlīz performances charge the space via the singing bowl’s multiple harmonics coupled with the kinetics between bodies in space. The tones from Eastern and South American instruments coupled with modern electronics evoke a powerful yet meditative space. With each live performance, new layers of the body are integrated into the work. The performing body is shot and projected in real time , allowing a new vantage point for viewing live work that will also dialogue with future work. rēkənˈteks(t)SH(əw)əˌlīz performances are meant to create a transcendent body over a twelve hour period that follows an improvisational score on a four hour loop. As the body exhausts itself new rhythms, organizations and emotional overtones are found in the familiar. The open format ensures that no two performances will be alike. |