Ryan Ferko is best known as part of an unnamed media collective that also features Parastoo and Faraz Anoushahpour. Their heady meta-docs take aim at official and unofficial memories, perception and empire. But Ryan also has a private practice, unglimpsed even in the largest corporate search engines or the slippery slopes of so-called social media. In this place where practice and process is everything, where the roots of the amateur can be recovered (amateur – from the Latin meaning “for the love of”), unexpected detours, experiments, play.
In the attention economy, how rare it is to find an artist with a private practice, who might return us to the Latin roots of the word amateur, which means: for the love of. To do something for the love of, instead of to accumulate attentions, likes and thumbs. I read it somewhere: there are just two kinds of artists: people with a daily practice, and deadline artists. Most of us are deadline artists. I’ve been thinking a lot about pressure lately, and how a deadline produces or raises some necessary level of pressure. The pressure that comes from a show, an upcoming gig, a promise from an institution. How does pressure work?
Pressure squeezes the body, and what comes oozing out are ideas, new relationships to material, new ways of understanding something you might see every day. Or else old ways of understanding, old ways of understanding what you already know. But if someone has a private practice, like tonight’s artist, where these public forms of pressure are not stretching the body with its demands for production, if the body is being stretched, pushed and pulled from the outside, what kind of work is it possible to do? Or even: what does that place sound like? How fortunate we are that Annah is here to offer us some clues, music for the temporary democracy of our temporary home. They will play for about 45 minutes, and then the talking will begin. Please join me in welcoming tonight’s artist Annah.
