Swimming to Inishkeel
Ekstasis
Concrete Republic
Traffic Island 
Prison Farm


Watchtower
Katrina
The Dog Tail Wars
Empire/Umpire
Hostis
Body Fluid Bed
Hanging Creatures

Homeless Deaths  
Poster Project

Full Shackle
Sapa
Swollen Eye
Frontiers
Deed

Every Revolution
Forces
Boarder
Surveillance Chair
Suite
Cruise Control

Ostrich
The Big Silence
Asylum Screamed
Think No Evil
Belfast
Crisus

 

EKSTASIS

2013
Good Children Gallery, New Orleans, LA

Ekstasis was a 36-hour performance in 3 parts, performed 12 noon till 12 midnight for 3 consecutive Saturdays in October 2013 at Good Children Gallery, New Orleans.

Last August I moved back to live in New Orleans having been in Baton Rouge for 10 years. I wanted to mark that event by starting from zero. The way that resonated most clearly for me was to literally start with nothing but my body and some materials, go into a space and using only my body, create an impression of myself on the walls and leave a record that I exist.

I had reached a point where I needed to reinvent or simply to rediscover myself. When I was younger I could lock myself in my studio for weeks at a time to think, process ideas and create work. Now with a job and children it’s not possible to have those long periods of uninterrupted focus. It is for me one of the most difficult aspects of being an artist.

I needed to go beyond the range of normal physical experience to a place or state that was directly experiential. This goal felt unreachable any other way and so the performance became for me the capacitor that built up and then released a surge of energy to push me from stillness to motion. I needed to break through and step out of myself, I needed to experience Ekstasis.

Written and Performed by: Malcolm McClay
Directed by: Jeff Becker
Sound by: Nathan John Normand Weidenhaft & Marcus E. Brown


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