Architectural Performance together with the artist Brad Downey.

An architectural suit is designed to fit around Brad.
The artist becomes the exhibition.
The artist becomes the display. The display moves.
The artist becomes a place to lean on while you look at art.
The artists’ place is for you to put your empty champagne glass.

The sharp, simple, white, abstract geometry generates inner and outer spaces that trigger or are a product of flux. Humorously, the suit has an initial parasitic condition upon the gallery space, while maintaining the original functional, interactive, touchable, and usable intention. The audience can lean on the artist and look at art, sit on the artist, or drink on the artist, while the artist remains anonymous (no one can see their face, just clothes).

The artist uses his mind and body to change the behaviours of the visitors, and determines how he will be used like the predetermined regulations of the architecture in place. The built space, usually the matrix to behave on, turns into something also with this additive strategy. The suit’s enclosure allows the artist to be used.

In effect, the artist has become a joke. He is unable to communicate with the audience, but the audience needs him in order to be there and to continue their evening. The artist is a ghost, shelled in an expensive wood suite. At the very end of the gallery performance, Diego lunged forward, breaking the piece, and surprising himself.

At the end of the gallery performance, Sculptor Brad Downey, the anonymous artist within the suit, wrote me an email about the work Suit Suite “He seemed very happy at the end of the day, then very sad for breaking it. He looked shocked when it got fucked up.” Diego, by breaking the suit, allows for the artist to rejoin the event and interact without a facade imposing restrictions.

[Rose Pacult]