Dead Sea, Jordan 2010
The Piso Mojado series is a succession of performances in which Tom Bogaert mounts a yellow multi-lingual safety cone onto a mooring buoy. The buoy travels to varying bodies of water. As of yet, Bogaert installed Pisos Mojados in Brooklyn, Staten Island, Belgium, Miami, Palestine and Jordan.
The Piso Mojado piece functions as an “open” work with no specific meaning imposed. This allows the interpretation of the work to change with it’s content, which is fluid and changes with time, context and audience.
For example, in Miami the buoy was interpreted as a comment on the ‘Wet Feet, Dry Feet Policy’: a Cuban citizen, who is caught on the waters between Cuba and the United States (i.e.’wet floor’), would summarily be sent home or to a third country. One who makes it to shore (‘dry floor’) gets a chance to remain in the US.
HRL banner – Spray paint on nylon fabric, 110 × 110 cm
Amendment to the Constitution which creates a ‘Human Rights Lottery’ (2009) replacing all existing Human Rights Legal Instruments.
This 28th Amendment proclaims that the holder of a winning HRL ticket shall be entitled to the rights and freedoms described in the winning human rights article(s) for seven days starting at 11:00 pm the night of the draw.
‘Human Rights Lottery’ (HRL) deals with the re-engineering of the relationship between the individual and the state. Starting point is the realization that the opportunity of enjoying personal freedom and genuine choices is a privilege accorded to a small part of the world lucky enough to be born in the right place, race, gender, religion, time, nationality, language or social group. HRL pushes the limits of the correlation between luck and human rights.
Tom Bogaert applied the New York State Lottery, Human Rights Watch’s logo and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as raw materials, contorting and recombining their content and use.
The form: text, performance, custom made stickers, spray painted banners and flags, publicity pencils and lottery forms.
LES JOYNES AND TOM BOGAERT
chashama performance space
266 West 37th St. (between 7th & 8th Aves)
New York, NY 10018
2009 laboratory hours (form-as-event) – May 4-12 daily, Mon-Sat 12-6pm
we live in a sea of detritus – orphaned objects are all around us and each has a discoverable narrative. Objects cast off onto the street (recyclables, litter, lost objects, broken objects) produce orphans of form. Their reading collapses and they become either invisible or part of the ambient formic noise of the street.
In this series of one and two-day projects, Joynes and Bogaert collect objects based on an agreed “daily menu” (made of a certain material, color, form) and then reprocess them at the 266 W 37th Street venue, rediscovering or reinventing the narratives of these cast-off objects. This project was conceived by Joynes in 2007 and is inspired in part by Claes Oldenburg’s object collecting and making in the Ray Gun Mfg. Co. in New York in 1962.
Please click here for video documentation (02:04)
‘Double Portraits’ renders homage to Ana Mendieta’s 1972 ‘Untitled (Facial Hair Transplants)’
“In ‘Untitled (Facial Hair Transplants),’ Ana Mendieta activated a cultural conception of the body. By gluing her friend’s beard onto her (female) face, she highlighted the fact that sexual classifications are social conventions that frame and overdetermine sexualities. By staging a mutant sexual identification, the artist problematized those classifications and disrupted the normative models of beauty by which society operates, differentiating between the feminine and the masculine.” (Brooklyn Museum – Brooklyn, NY)
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Based on religious sticker stamps, which I bought in the church shop of the ‘Monastery of the Magnificat of the Mother of God’ in Quebec, I create portraits of contemporary icons. Seated at a lemonade stand, I invite bystanders to witness the stamp transformations and give the public the opportunity to buy the original stickers and new icons for 25 cents each.
When people buy four stickers, they receive a unique photocopied collector sheet for free. As of yet, I have sold 1256 stickers.