Edward Cella Art & Architecture is proud to present My Turn (2018), the latest collaboration form Alex Schweder and Ward Shelley. Selected by Jen Mergel for the Armory’s Platform program, which debuted in 2017 as a section devoted to large-scale and site-specific artworks, My Turn will be inhabited by both Schweder and Shelley for eight hours each day of the fair.
Simultaneously a site-specific installation and performance, the project takes the form of a rotating wheel sixteen feet in diameter and contains on opposing sides of its interior two platforms with chairs. Both Shelley and Schweder are thus faced with the constant negotiation of limited resources: both artists cannot sit at the same time. My Turn explores the ways in which humans shape their environment, and their environment in turn shapes them, a dynamic made pressing in a world with a growing population and shrinking resources.
For the past ten years, Alex Schweder and Ward Shelley have been practicing a form of experimental architecture that explores the dance between the designed environment and its consequences. The duo have designed, built, and lived in (or on) seven structures, all of them in locations where the public are invited not only to witness, but also to actively engage with the artists in direct dialogue about their practice—an activity that has coalesced into what they call “performance architecture.” As Schweder states: “I see performance and architecture as intrinsically connected. It’s not about doing something radical, it’s about helping to change people’s perspectives on how things occur in the everyday.”
Running concurrently to the Armory exhibition, Alex Schweder’s site-specific work titled Davenport Yawn (2018) will be shown at the Collective Design fair in New York City, March 9-11, 2018. The duo’s ongoing exhibitions include: ReActor (2016) at the OMI International Arts Center in Ghent, New York, through July 2018; and Your Turn (2017) at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, Connecticut, through April 2018.
