From the billing for the event:

In the spirit of alternative art spaces, VILE BODIES will use the space and the audience as part of the art experience. In a carefully coordinated performance, the audience becomes the medium of change in what, to all outer appearances, is just another Brooklyn mashup of live music, video art, videogames, and booze over a backdrop of disregarded art.

How can traditional painting compete against such compelling distractions? This installation by artist Martha Hipley challenges the notion that the artist must fight to win an audience by embracing these distractions as part of a larger experiment. In paintings that combine modern technology with traditional technique, the art becomes interactive and responsive to its attentive (or inattentive) audience, destroying itself over the span of the event in a plea for attention. In this way the distractions of the space become essential to the message of the work- that environment is everything.

In my first presentation of non-commercial work in New York, I sought out to create works that would become a part of an event rather than paintings that would be merely featured in an event. After several months of research, I created my own encaustic paints out of natural and synthetic waxes that would react to the body heat within the venue and the heat of the lighting elements that illuminated them over the course of the evening. The results were unexpected and unique.

The stained-glass effect of the light boxes in combination with the number and content of the images, which were carefully planned as a “Stations of the Cross,” contributed to the concept of venue as a secular church where artistic ideals are often lost amid the distracting financial strategies that make such spaces viable.

The work was shown for one night only at 285 Kent in Brooklyn, and coincided with a Babycastles presentation of alt sex games curated by Leigh Alexander.

Photos courtesy of Katie Osgood Photography.