ARENA

Arena is a new performance by Madeline Hollander composed of a series of duets featuring beach rake trucks and six dancers. The work presents a choreographic study of dissipative structures and autopoiesis, as well a homage to the contradictions inherent in the documentation of ephemeral art forms. The beach rakes clear pathways that become the stage for the dancers, whose movement patterns are recorded through their tracks in the newly combed sand. The first half of the performance presents dancers following in the wake of the trucks, leaving a legible trail of notation in the sand. The second half presents the reverse - the trucks follow close behind the dancers, erasing all footprints and traces of movement, or existence, as they go. This is repeated ad infinitum until the sun goes down.

Photography by Samantha Casolori; Film stills by Sam Fleischner

About the Artist:
Madeline Hollander is a New York based artist who works primarily with performance and video to explore how human movement and body-language negotiate their limits within everyday systems of technology, intellectual property law, and mass-culture. Hollander has exhibited work at Socrates Sculpture Park, NY; Off Vendome, NY; Signal, NY; Movement Research at the Judson Church, NY; Untitled Art Fair, Miami, FL; Luxembourg & Dayan Gallery, NY; the Sculpture Center, NY; Jack Hanley Gallery, NY; Tina Kim Gallery, NY; The Kitchen, NY; Torrance Shipman Gallery, NY; and Human Resources, LA. Hollander has danced professionally with Los Angeles Ballet, CA, and Barcelona Ballet, Spain. She is a recipient of the 2016 Socrates Sculpture Park Emerging Artist Fellowship and an MFA candidate in the Film/Video department at Bard College.

This photo series was commissioned through Beach Sessions' Dance x Air program, which is a collaborative project between presenting artists and photographers of distinction using untapped resources in Rockaway to create original visual content.