C. Ryder Cooley performs Animalia at MCLA

04:39PM / Friday, November 13, 2009

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Wednesday, November 18, at 7:30 p.m. at MCLA’s Church Street Center. (Ryder Cooley, photo by J. Craig Thompkins)

NORTH ADAMS, Mass. - Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts presents Animalia: Stories of Collapse, Calamity and Departure, a lyrical fairytale by C. Ryder Cooley with Todd Chandler, Anna Jacobs and special guests, Wednesday, November 18, at 7:30 p.m. at MCLA’s Church Street Center. Ryder, a performance-installation artist, brings Animalia to North Adams as part of the MCLA Presents! series.

Animalia combines music on singing saw, accordion, banjo, and bass with theatrical movement. Performed within a landscape of mesmerizing video and archival film, the work invokes visions of secret bee societies and haunted circus scenes.

This feature length, multi-media performance offers metaphors of flight as departure points from environmental collapse and the hallucinatory effects of war.

By appropriating the masculine power symbol of the buck rack and reinserting it onto feminine characters, the narrative blurs the divisions between masculine/feminine identity and human/animal forms. Ryder’s work can also be seen at the current exhibition in MCLA Gallery 51, Nest.

MCLA Art Professor Melanie Mowinski, the curator of the show at MCLA Gallery 51, approached Ryder about working with students, exploring both her visual as well as her performance work.

“It seemed a natural fit to co-present her performance work as part of MCLA Presents!,” said Jonathan Secor, director of special programs at MCLA. “She literally spent a week building a ‘nest’ here at the gallery, inhabited by her work. Now I can't wait to see the world she builds in the Church Street Center on Wednesday.”

Dedicated to presenting work in unique and site-specific settings, Ryder has participated in a wide range of public works, educational projects, and international shows.

Named Best Performance Artist by residents of New York’s Capital District in 2006 and 2007, selected works have been performed and installed at White Box and Exit Art galleries in New York City, Yerba Buena and Theater Artaud in San Francisco, and Proctors Mainstage Theater in Schenectady, NY, among other sites.

Ryder, a resident of Troy, NY, received a master’s of fine arts degree in integrated electronic arts from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 2008 and a bachelor’s of fine arts degree in sculpture from Rhode Island School of Design in 1993.

Animalia also features Todd Chandler, who worked with Ryder on a series of musical collaborations called Fall Harbor. In 2008 they produced a CD, Songs from Fall Harbor.

Todd is an inter-disciplinary artist, musician and creator of impressionistic and introspective journey-oriented films and issue-driven documentaries.

Anna Jacobs is a Brooklyn-based circus artist and performer. She has performed with LAVA and Wise Fool Circus.

Animalia was developed as part at the Byrd-Hoffman Watermill Center with the support of NYFA, The MacDowell Colony and Yaddo. Tickets are $12, $8 for MCLA alumni, $5 for MCLA faculty and staff and non-MCLA students, and free for MCLA students. For reservations call (413) 662-5204.

MCLA Presents! is a program of MCLA’s Berkshire Cultural Resource Center. For more information about C. Ryder Cooley email rydercooley@yahoo.com or visit www.carolynrydercooley.com.