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Guided ICA Tour: Charles Atlas: About Time

  • ICA 25 Harbor Shore Drive Boston, MA, 02210 United States (map)

Join us for a guided tour of Charles Atlas' upcoming exhibition at the ICA!

Through guided close looking, discussion, and the sharing of contextual background information, ICA tour guides will help us deepen our understanding of the artist and exhibit on this one hour tour. After the tour, for those interested, we will convene at the ICA Wine and Cafe Bar for a light snack and or beverage. Only 20 spots available! Register early to grab a spot.

About the Exhibition:
Charles Atlas is oriented around the artist’s groundbreaking work at the intersections of moving image, dance, and performance, and his intimate video portraits of close collaborators and friends. The shifting political and cultural landscape of the United States from the 1970s to the present acts as a backdrop to this dynamic visual exhibition, addressing themes of performance and portraiture, gender and sexuality, and collaboration and friendship.

Charles Atlas: About Time is the first U.S. museum survey of the pioneering interdisciplinary artist Charles Atlas (b. 1949 in St. Louis). Spanning 50 years of work, this retrospective is conceived as an immersive environment for the visitor, featuring several monumental multi-channel video installations, or “walk-through experiences,” as the artist describes them. To create these installations, Atlas “explodes” single-channel videos into new configurations, presenting the videos on multiple suspended screens and monitors around the gallery, so visitors can move between and among them.

About Charles Atlas:
Atlas’s early career is defined by his time as filmmaker-in-residence at the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, New York. Atlas and Cunningham created the genre of “media-dance”: dance made for the camera, rather than an in-person audience, wherein the camera moves seamlessly in concert with the dancers. Since leaving the Merce Cunningham Dance Company in 1983, Atlas has been a leading figure in film and video art, and one of the preeminent artists to capture dance and performance for the camera through groundbreaking collaborations with Michael Clark, Yvonne Rainer, Leigh Bowery, Marina Abramović, Rashaun Mitchell, and Silas Riener, and many others. Much of Atlas’s genre-defying, collaborative work has proved prescient for a generation of artists working today. Contemporary concerns such as the creative possibilities of performance and portraiture on camera and the political urgency of challenging conventions of gender, sexuality, and queer identity have been at the heart of Atlas’s creative output for decades. 

When

Saturday, November 2, 2024
10:00 AM - 11:30AM

Where

ICA/Boston, 25 Harbor Shore Drive, Boston, MA 02210

Cost

Non-ICA Members (Adults): $22, Non-ICA Members (Seniors, 60+): $20, ICA Members: $6

Questions?

For event questions, contact Carrie Huang