Catherine Wagley
This past July, mostly nude performers in body paint spent five hours moving around China Art Objects Gallery as part of a performance by L.A. artist Emily Mast. They were posing with one another, one performer slowly squeezing another's face, or wandering around a set that included triangles of tape on the floor and a red rectangle on the wall. All the moves and gestures in this performance, called Index, came from Mast's previous performances. These gestures had interested her and she wanted to try them again in a different context. This tendency to revisit and revise her art, which often involves actors or dancers and occurs in front of a live audience, makes Mast's process especially interesting to follow. An artist who always pairs her tasteful visual sensibility with an interest in the uncomfortable chaos of being a person, she's letting her audience watch as she figures out what works.
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