Studio Lecture: Ward Shelley

Every Push Pushes Back Life is an elaborate, overlapping series of structures: work, family, sports, government, religion, etc. Each of these provides and limits the space in which we conduct the frequently banal business of living, allowing us to go from task to task without having to ask ourselves "why?" One might even assert that architecture is a manifestation of our social structures and similarly provides us shelter from life's Big Questions, such as what does my life mean? Yet these structures are not fixed and unchangeable. In a series of performances, semi-extreme performance artist Ward Shelley replaces the architecture of the familiar with the Architecture of the Grotesque. Living inside these constructions for periods of up to a month, the taken-for-granted is jettisoned. New reasons for everything need to be established, and the meanings of our actions and our selves must be re-confronted. By his own admission, it is a ridiculous proposition, these voluntary journeys into the bizarre. But against the background of questions unasked, the ridiculous gains significance.