WORD OF MOUTH * Megan Michalak

WORD OF MOUTH
ARTISTS BY ARTISTS

6 DE DEZEMBRO, ÀS 14 HORAS, AULA MAGNA

MEGAN MICHALAK
Rehearsals for Unfinished Histories
 

Description: 
Megan Michalak’s work is a public invitation. Inspired by William Burrough’s statement, “If you cut into the present, the future leaks out,” she asks: if we, the public, held the historical-record hostage, what would the ransom note say? What would get reinserted? Through addressing the performance of historiography in multiple registers of media, her work creates counter-sites where citizens can perform and contest histories of cultural and community memory. For her talk at the University of Porto, Michalak will present recent works on the subjects of interrupted histories, archives and databases, and will screen excerpts from her film “Precariedade (Precarity)” a tale of globalization with Portugal as the protagonist.


Biography
Megan Michalak is a queer intermedia artist currently working in New York where she is an Assistant Professor in the Visual Studies Department, at the State University of New York, Buffalo. Megan Michalak’s work is a public invitation. She asks: if we, the public, held the historical-record hostage, what would the ransom note say? What would get reinserted? Through addressing the
performance of historiography in multiple registers of media, her work creates counter-sites where citizens can perform and contest histories of cultural & community memory. Her practice transposes feminist and documentary methodologies to harvest messages from the public & confront the “unreliable narrator” with yet another story. Michalak’s studio practice spans sculpture, performance, digital media and drawing. International exhibits include: the 2nd Moscow Biennale for Young Art, Galarie Titanik (Turku, Finland), Fonds Regional D’Art Contemporain Frac Languedoc-Roussillon (Montpelier, France), and the International Festival of Choreography in Paris. She has additionally screened performance-based works in film video festivals in France, Spain, Portugal, Mexico, and Brazil. Within the US she has exhibited at the Bronx Museum of the Arts, the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, and the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Art Interactive (Boston), Arthouse at the Jones Center (Austin, TX), Artists Space, and Smack Mellon Gallery in New York City. She is the co-recipient of a Film, Media and New Technology Grant from the New York State Council of the Arts, three Finishing Fund Grants from the Experimental Television Center, two residencies at the MacDowell Colony, and funded residencies at Harvestworks, and Smack Mellon Gallery in New York City. In 2006 Michalak received an MFA in
Studio for Interrelated Media from the Massachusetts College of Art, and an MFA in Sculpture from Bard College in 2001.

http://meganmichalak.com/home.html