Anna Betbeze and HR present: Rehearsals for A Color Play

Gallery Hours: Thursday-Sunday, 12 – 6pm
Opening: Saturday, June 15, 4 – 6pm
Open rehearsals: Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, June 21 – 23, 4 – 6pm
Closing Reception: Sunday, June 23, 6 – 8pm

Rehearsals for A Color Play is an experiment, an invitation, a painting, a stage, and a score. A space to consider that color is a live material, extra-visual, beyond optical/retinal sensation. Using dyed fabrics as its central material, curtains, shrouds, veils, clothing, and flags become sites for color language, expressivity, kinetic form, and social and political organization.

Rehearsals will be the first phase in an ongoing project, A Color Play, that interrogates the expressive aspects of color. Color here is not theoretical, it is tethered to experience and cannot be unbound or contained, it bounces; reflects, seeps, touches, an active catalyst for all kinds of change. 

Each day will perform a chapter, each chapter an inquiry into hidden aspects of color. The first chapter, The Swamp, will play with color’s ruinous, entropic, and muddy aspects; the potential for synaesthetic landscape, fusing ends with beginnings. Each chapter will follow the last, improvisationally, an open ended project designed to change course. 

Betbeze invites participants and showgoers to play and intervene in the set,  and/or to sit, lounge, contemplate, listen. Rehearsals will be held 4 – 6 pm Friday, Saturday and Sunday. The stage set will be on display for viewing during gallery hours, 12 – 6 pm.

Rehearsals for a Color Play extends and bridges Anna Betbeze’s experiments with touch and the tactile sense. This project marks the beginning of experiments into the psychological, social, and affective registers of color, through returning color to the tactile, material world.  

The immediacy and honesty of sensation reveal complexities in human experience that can critique, destabilize, and de-center the dominance of visual perception in contemporary culture.We exist within a world that is increasingly circumscribed by the optics of digital technology, and its concomitant limitations and expansions of the perceivable world. Centering sensation allows me to consider the fullness and ephemerality of lived experience and the true urgencies of this moment alongside the supposed deathlessness of artistic creation. 

Special thanks to: HR, Aimee Goeblins Gougen, John Buttdial, Jennifer Doyle, Andre Keichian, Corazón Del Sol, Jason Gowans, The Guggenheim Foundation, BAU Institute, Camargo Foundation and University of California-Riverside.