Sponsored by the Walentas Family and Two Trees Management for the
Dumbo Arts Festival, a weekend-long neighborhood arts festival featuring exciting outdoor projects, open studios and special exhibitions.



On September 24th and 25th, 2010, Smack Mellon presents the premiere of multi-media artist Janet Biggs’ powerful new work exploring chaos and control.

Biggs merges the fierce athleticism of fighting kayaks with pounding drum beats and the siren-like chords of a violinist against a landscape of projected video in her new multi-media performance WET EXIT.

Taking its title from the term used to describe an emergency exit from a capsized kayak, WET EXIT examines the relationship between power and desire, chaos and control, where harmony and cooperation end in misunderstanding, conflict, and aggression. Musicians, dancers, and kayak polo players perform against the backdrop of the Manhattan skyline while the audience watches from amphitheater seating at The Cove Between the Bridges in the Brooklyn Bridge Park.

Projected video images from Biggs’ recent expedition to film kayaks in the Arctic are combined with live synchronized kayaks in a nod to Busby Berkeley’s lavish musicals, and the choreography of navel maneuvers.

The piece opens with a lone violinist playing on the shore. The chords she plays mimic the sound of an air raid siren. Two dancers join the violinist carrying kayak paddles. Video images of kayaks in the Arctic appear on a large-scale screen. The dancers use the paddles as extensions of their bodies as they perform graceful arcs in the air. Eventually, the paddles become weapons as the dancers struggle for dominance.

The dancers retreat from view as lights come up on a drummer poised behind his drums out in the water. The drummer and his kit are floating on a platform anchored off shore. The drummer plays a slow marching beat. Four kayaks paddle into view. The kayaks perform a series of synchronized movement. The drummer, now joined by the violinist a cellist, and a vocalist pick up the pace as the ballet like movements of the kayaks becomes a battle of spins and speed. The rhythm of the paddles and kayaks as they slam into each other is echoed by the percussionists as he performs a thundering, aggressive beat.

Musicians:
Drums:  Blake Fleming
Cello: William Martina
Violin: Mazz Swift

Vocalist:
Carol Grayson-Johnson

Kayak Paddlers:
New York Kayak Polo (ny kayakpolo.org) team members:
Dmitri Bougakov
Mikhail Kazachkov
Margaret Mann
Agassi Nakhapetian
 

Artist/Director:
Janet Biggs is an artist primarily known for her videos, video installations, and performances. She lives and works in New York City.

She has captured the excitement and athleticism of speeding motorcycles on the Bonneville Salt Flats, horses galloping on treadmills, Olympic synchronized swimmers in their attempts to defy gravity, and icebergs floating off Iceland.

Her work has been reviewed/featured in publications, including the New York Times, the New Yorker, Contemporary, Art in America, ArtNews, and Sports Illustrated.

Her work has been exhibited, among other institutions, at the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Ithaca, New York; Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, New York; Gibbes Museum of Art, South Carolina; Rhode Island School of Design Museum, Rhode Island; Vantaa Art Museum, Finland; Linkopings Konsthall, Passagen, Sweden; and the Oberosterreichisches Landesmuseum, Austria.

Biggs is the recipient of numerous grants and awards including the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, Art Matters, and the New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA) Film & Media / New Tech Production grant through the Experimental Television Center.  Her work is in public collections including the High Museum (Atlanta), Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University (Ithaca, New York); Mint Museum of Art (Charlotte, North Carolina); Gibbes Museum of Art (Charleston, South Carolina); and the New Britain Museum of Art (Connecticut).

Janet Biggs is represented by Conner Contemporary Art in Washington, D.C., Solomon Projects, Atlanta, and Winkleman Gallery in New York, N.Y.