Autumn Ahn at The Chimney

Autumn Ahn
A Tall Action Is Not a Height, 2017
Performance video still
Image courtesy The Chimney

Autumn Ahn's performance, "A Tall Action Is Not a Height" is a mesmerizing visual feat.  It is a physical experience and a metaphysical experience.  The Chimney located on Morgan Avenue in Brooklyn provided the perfect venue for the performance installation.  Quietly tucked away in an area of industrial constructions is a little white house in which everything unfolds.

Inspired by Gertrude Stein's "Rooms" in her book called Tender Buttons, Autumn creates a narrative that denies linear chronology in time.  When Stein wrote the book, she intended to create an experience without evoking the act of looking.  Exploring her medium as a writer, she uses words weaving together physical descriptions of objects to be seen only through the mind's eye.  For the writer the act of looking calls forth images hidden away in memory, therefore she sets out to create an experience taking place purely in the present moment. Like the story, Autumn's performance evolves in the experience of the present moment. Leaving no room for wondering into the past or the future, the performance combines sounds of nature, projections of moving image, and the physical human body moving with fluidity.  

Autumn Ahn
A Tall Action Is Not a Height, 2017
Performance video still
Image courtesy The Chimney

From the outside the little white house looks as if a residential parking garage.  There is a door on the side, when it opens it is like looking through a kaleidoscope. Autumn's film projections moving through the space evoke the feeling of being surrounded by nature. This experience of serenity is contrasted by the artist's body suspending from the ceiling top by climbing ropes.  Her acrobatic movements balance between the precariousness of physical suspension and the stability provided by earth's gravity.  Oscillating back and forth, the sense of uncertainty is constantly present.  Like so many questions are raised without them being answered definitively, Autumn's performance challenges notions of security, established truth, and absolute conviction about everything in art and life.  

The Chimney will host another performance on May 7.

Autumn Ahn
A Tall Action Is Not a Height, 2017
Performance video still
Video provided Anissa Touati at The Chimney