Keeping Young & Living Longer: How to stay Active & Healthy past 100, or How to avoid Life Shortening Errors | Rosa Nussbaum + Kevin Brophy

Special Residency
Written By Elsewhere Living Museum & Artist Residency

Kevin Brophy (Tampa, FL / Pittsburgh, PA) + Rosa Nussbaum (Austin, TX)
Southern Constellations Fellows. February 2019.

Brophy and Nussbaum’s Keeping Young & Living Longer: How to stay Active & Healthy past 100, or How to avoid Life Shortening Errors (Full Title) is a series of performative texts in the form of humorous video vignettes and mock instructional animations. These videos are informed by the source texts: Keeping Young and Living Longer, Wolf: Cub Scout Book, McCall’s April 1960 issue, and the article “A Pox on your Husband’s Ego,” as well as a few others from the museum collection. This media is installed in Elsewhere’s Library amongst a collection of books curated by the artists and discreetly housed within a fabricated surrogate of the book titled Face to Face.

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Video book

Performance video documentation displayed inside sculpture. 13 min 44 secs. Museum collection fabric, thread, stuffing, books; programmed Raspberry Pi with video.Raspberry Pi, Found book, embedded tft screen

Keeping Young & Living Longer at Women and Their Work Gallery, May 2019. Photo Credit: Ryan Hawk

Keeping Young & Living Longer at Women and Their Work Gallery, May 2019. Photo Credit: Ryan Hawk

The impetus of this work stemmed from an analysis of the rhetoric of the museum, explicitly that of the library. Much of the books mined for this project range in intended audience, from children to senior citizens, and date back to the 1960-80s. The language used is gendered, infantilizing, and ageist: somewhat offensive. With a critical eye, the artists saw a Youth-Cult and a Wife-Pet, among other things. They begged the question: What culture do we uphold? What do we archive without discernment?

Project In Response To: Elsewhere Library

Work in Progress, creating costumes and props. Documentation of props fabricated for videos and live performance during opening exhibition. Photo credit: Shameeka Davis-Dunning and Amelia Nura.

Featured
Rosa Nussbaum
Rosa Nussbaum

Rosa Nussbaum is a British/German visual artist based in Austin, Texas. Rosa works at the intersection of performance and sculpture, of object and objectification. Her work explores the place where the (female) body touches the institution, submitting to it’s projected desires.

During Nussbaum’s residency, she created Keeping Young & Living Longer: How to stay Active & Healthy past 100, or How to avoid Life Shortening Errors with fellow Kevin Brophy.

Kevin Brophy
Kevin Brophy

Kevin Brophy is a language-based performance artist based in Tampa, FL, and Pittsburgh, PA, most recently residing in Lawrence, KS as visiting faculty and artist at the University of Kansas. Her research includes the Internet of Things, biased training of AI, our changing psychological response to the screen, and how language functions—past, present, and future—in relation to these cultural occurrences. Kevin works at the intersection of digital and physical space; as in, the ‘crash’ of these two bodies and their mutual creation within the construct of the social. Our politic embodied and our personal beyond the site-of-self. Through exaggerated forms of communication, she critiques in satirical and self-implicating ways: these days, she performs more for machine than human.

During Brophy’s residency, she created Keeping Young & Living Longer: How to stay Active & Healthy past 100, or How to avoid Life Shortening Errors with fellow Rosa Nussbaum.

Elsewhere Living Museum & Artist Residency
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