HouseBroken: Melissa Stern and Louisa Pancoast at -The Gallery ltd-, New York

HouseBroken: A collaborative exhibition by Melissa Stern and Louisa Pancoast is on view at -The Gallery ltd-, New York

October 1-31, 2021

-the Gallery ltd- is proud to present HouseBroken, a collaborative exhibition by visual artist Melissa Stern and performing artist Louisa Pancoast.

HouseBroken is a witty and poignant look at our relationship to our homes and the multitude of roles we assign our living spaces. Let’s face it, we all spent too much time at home in the last year. This exhibition captures both the emotion of being trapped and the feeling of being set free. The artists untangle the question of what does it mean to be broken and fortified by one space.

The installation features Stern’s sculptures and mixed-material artwork and videos looping through footage of Pancoast dancing in response to the gallery’s art and environment. Stern and Pancoast will host a series of live performances throughout the run of the installation.

In the spirit of the Judson Church era, Stern and Pancoast have created an immersive visual arts environment populated with, and activated by, movement and sound. Inspired by the past eighteen months of lockdown, HouseBroken looks at the duality of our home lives– its comfort and containment–how we allow ourselves to be held and how we attempt to break free.

Melissa Stern’s drawings and sculptures expose our most fundamental feelings about our living spaces. Whether the yearning to liberate ourselves, or the comfortable discomfort of the family dynamic, Stern captures the vulnerability of home. HouseBroken questions what is broken and who or what is doing the breaking. Stern’s figures, brimming with energy, bring instability and vitality to our notion of “home sweet home.”

Stern’s artworks create a Universe for Louisa Pancoast’s performance. Using Stern’s figures as a primary source for movement vocabulary. Pancoast lives in, runs from, haunts, and plays in the home of the gallery space. The audience takes on the role of the family, and is invited to engage with the performance and the space to create currents of intimacy and provocation.

Performance schedule: 10/2 – 5pm, 10/3 – 2pm, 10/9 – 2 pm and 5 pm, 10/16 – 2 pm and 5 pm, 10/17 – 2pm, 10/23 – 2 pm, 10/24 – 2 pm, 10/30 – 2 pm and 5 pm, 10/31 – 2 pm.

Melissa Stern is an artist and journalist living in NYC. Melissa has worked in sculpture, mixed media and drawing for over twenty years, exhibiting throughout the U.S as well as Europe and Asia. Her multi-media installation exhibition, The Talking Cure, has been traveling to museums around the US. since 2012 and will open at The Fuller Museum in Brookston MA in Jan. 2022. Her work is featured in a number of prominent corporate and museum collections including News Corporation, JP Morgan, The Arkansas Art Center, the American Museum of Ceramic Art, Racine Art Museum, and the Weisman Art Museum in Minneapolis.

With a background in anthropology, Melissa’s work reflects both non-Western and outsider-art influences. Her drawings, collages, and figurative sculptures are richly drawn and deeply layered, with quirky, often dark humor.

Louisa Pancoast has had the privilege of performing for such choreographers as Yvonne Rainer at the Museum of Modern Art, Diego Funes, Pat Catterson, Sommer Ulrickson and Alexander Polzin, Cleo Mack and Rock Dance Collective, Pramila Vasudevan, Michelle Thompson-Ulerich. Louisa has appeared in videos directed by The Kuperman Brothers and Gierre Godley; and has served as performer and movement director for rapper Lando Chill’s music video, Light Her and Diego Funes’ short film, ABSENCE.

Louisa’s choreographic endeavors include Strange Girl Dances: A Visual Duet with Melissa Stern, at Garvey|Simon Gallery, New York, NY, an adaptation of W.B. Yeats’ play Purgatory, produced by Plaxall Gallery, Long Island City, First in Half, Then in Quarters, produced by Mixily Presents, and Pinch Back, commissioned by Main Window DUMBO.

Contact
creativemyth@hotmail.com

-The Gallery ltd-
37 N 15th Street
Brooklyn, NY 11222 (enter on Gem St.)

Photos courtesy of the artists and -The Gallery ltd-