Cristin Tierney Gallery is pleased to announce Shout, Recount, Get Drunk, a special project consisting of both public and private performances organized by MK Guth. An opening reception with the artist will be held on Tuesday, June 21st from 6:00 to 8:00 pm, and performances will run daily from June 22nd through July 1st during regular gallery hours. This is Guth’s first project with Cristin Tierney Gallery.
Instructions for Drinking with a Friend is a public performance occurring four times each day at the gallery. Select visitors drink whiskey together in the space, following instructions provided by the artist. The gallery installation also features vignettes of found and handcrafted objects, each of which corresponds to a performance enacted in New York during the run of the project. Included in every sculptural still life is an artist book with instructions for the performance, as well as recipes, images, drawings, and texts to guide each experience. In Instructions for Drinking with a Friend, for example, visitors find a table and two stools, two hand-blown glasses, a custom engraved bottle of whiskey, and a handmade book that outlines the rules of their performance. Similarly, the two private performances—Dinner for Remembering and Dinner to Plan a Revolution—are represented by curated assemblages of readymade and found objects that pertain to the dinners’ respective themes: remembering something past, and envisioning desired change.
Positioned around the rituals and sites of sharing food and drink, Shout, Recount, Get Drunk illuminates how social interaction is shaped through rites and treasured objects, calling special attention to the overlooked narratives in our everyday experiences. Throughout her career, Guth has continually explored how we orient ourselves in the larger social and spatial landscape. In an era when human relations are increasingly mediated by the digital world, these questions have ever-greater significance. Visitors and participants are also prompted to question where, exactly, the artwork exists. Is it located in the object, the performance, or the more liminal context of the gallery space, which functions simultaneously as a site of presentation, performance, dining hall, and tavern?
Instructions for Drinking with a Friend will take place four times on each day, from Wednesday, June 22nd through Saturday, the 25th, and from Monday, June 27th through Friday, July 1st. The daily time slots are as follows: 12:00 to 1:00 pm, 1:30 to 2:30 pm, 3:00 to 4:00 pm, and 4:30 to 5:30 pm. Interested parties may sign up for a time slot by contacting Candace Moeller at [email protected] or +1.212.594.0550. Participants will be sent instructions for the performance in advance.
An alumna of the New York University graduate school of fine arts, MK Guth has exhibited her work internationally at numerous museums and festivals including The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, The Melbourne International Arts Festival, Nottdance Festival, The Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, The Art Gym at Marylhurst University, Swiss Institute, WhiteBox Annex, White Columns, Artists Space, Side Street Projects, The Frye Art Museum, and The Henry Art Gallery at the University of Washington. Guth is a founding member of the RED SHOE DELIVERY SERVICE, an ongoing collaborative performance project with artists Molly Dilworth and Cris Moss. Recently, the artist completed a residency at The Schneider Museum of Art, where she produced some of the materials for the present exhibition. She is the recipient of the Betty Bowen Special Recognition Award, administered by The Seattle Art Museum, and an Award of Merit from The Bellevue Arts Museum. Guth is currently Associate Professor at the Pacific Northwest College of Art. She lives and works in Portland, OR.
Shout, Recount, Get Drunk is made possible through the generous support of The Ford Family Foundation, The Schneider Museum of Art, and Indio Spirits.
