edge town / town edge
2012 Video Documentation of April 5th Performance at New Town, St. Charles, Missouri. Video was installed at The Des Lee Gallery in 2012 for the MFA First Year Thesis Show in St. Louis, Missouri.
The artist, costumed as a circus performer, tightrope walks through a residential street in a New Urbanist town. The performance is a spectacle that points to the in-vogue fashion aspirations driven by pop culture, and the American middle-class desire to approximate “perfection” within a utopian development. The artist chose to perform the tightrope walking on a back street cement fill line between garage doors, a banal area that looks out onto the surrounding corn fields.
The performance points to the absurd aesthetics of the space, while tracing the edge of this cheaply constructed frame house development.
JaNae Contag 