Aflutter Aflame Adrift | Kaz K Sherman

For her second solo show with the gallery, Sherman presents objects and images evoking lost time, calamitous interruptions, phantom purposes, and fruitful mistakes. Hand carved electrical outlets, artifacts from dances, cloth replicas of wooden sculptures, and imaginary utilitarian objects sit alongside photographic prints and videos of vacated or destroyed spaces. Created over several years spanning the pandemic, the death of her mother, the destruction of her studio, and a sidelining injury, newer works respond to older ones, prompting questions about how people, places, and plans change over time — or don’t.

Since launching in 2016, HAIR+NAILS founders/directors Kristin Van Loon and Ryan Fontaine have had a particular interest in the intersection of performing and visual arts. Fontaine was a musician before becoming a visual artist and Van Loon is a dancer/choreographer. It was in the dance world between NYC and Minneapolis that Van Loon and Sherman first met. Kaz K Sherman was one of the first artists to exhibit with HAIR+NAILS; her show Minor Bodies was in the gallery’s second season in early 2018.

In Aflutter Aflame Adrift, visitors will experience multiple elements of Kaz K Sherman’s work in dance, visual art, writing, and the manual trades. These disciplines mix freely in her work: in her dances, she choreographs and performs, builds sets and props, designs sound, and writes dialogue. She maintains a separate practice in visual art and craft, including woodworking, upholstery, andnsculpture, but the influence of her dance-making is always palpable, such as in the commingled somatics of soft upholstery and splintered lumber, evidencing both ephemerality and wear-and-tear, and in her consideration of the viewer’s experience of space, time, and sequence. Collectively, her practice illuminates how the body extends to and through other materials and culminates in an interdependent world where objects elucidate bodies, choreography is language, and words become tools.

She frequently pursues difficult subjects, such as in her large-scale performance work Soft Goods (commissioned/premiered at Walker Art Center, 2016) which explored the occupational self-obliteration of stagehands, or Minor Bodies (HAIR+NAILS, 2018) which centered around bloodletting and the lives of lab animals. But within the darkness, her work is full of wry humor and emotion, combining seeming oppositions —violence/compassion, isolation/comfort, loss/pleasure— as coexistent realities, with sorrow, humor, and reverence all mixed up together.

Kaz K. Sherman’s work incorporates her background in dance, writing, theater, music, and the manual trades. Hands-on in all aspects of her work, she choreographs and performs, builds sets and props, designs sound, and writes text. Her explorations in craft and visual art, including woodworking, upholstery, glassblowing, and sculpture, illuminate how the body extends to and through other materials, culminating in an interdependent world where objects elucidate bodies, choreography is language, and words become tools. She has been a freelance stage technician, technical director, and production manager for over 30 years, which allows her to instinctively strategize the technical execution of her own projects as she creates it, and signals a lifelong commitment to helping other artists realize their work.

Her projects have been presented nationally by Walker Art Center (Minneapolis), PS 122 (NYC), Center for the Art of Performance at UCLA (Los Angeles), Fusebox Festival (Austin, TX), Portland Museum of Contemporary Art/TBA Festival (Portland, OR), Chocolate Factory Theater (NYC), Red Eye Theater (Minneapolis), HAIR+NAILS (Minneapolis), Roman Susan (Chicago), Katherine E. Nash Gallery (Minneapolis), and many others. Honors include four MacDowell Fellowships, an Alpert Award, a Hodder Fellowship (Princeton University), a NY Dance and Performance ‘Bessie' Award, four McKnight Fellowships, a Bush Artist Fellowship, and residencies with Vermont Performance Lab, LUMBERYARD/ADI (Rockville, MD), National Center for Choreography Akron, Alverno Presents (Milwaukee), and the Bogliasco Foundation in Liguria, Italy. Her writing has been featured in such forums as e-flux journal, Movement Research Performance Journal, Criticism Exchange, and The Triumph of Poverty: Poems Inspired by the Work of Nicole Eisenman. Kaz K Sherman is based in Minneapolis by way of NYC.
Instagram: @kesksay

Gallery Hours:
Thursdays - Sundays: 1:00- 5:00

Image: KAZ K SHERMAN how to turn around (2019) injet print. 36”x 48”