DaWire

Chicks on Speed, Bawag Contemporary performance, Vienna, 7 May 2009.

Lying somewhere between performance art, DIY fashion and electroclash music, Chicks on Speed is a multimedia art collective formed in 1997 by Melissa Logan, Kiki Moorse and Alex Murray-Leslie while studying together at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich, Germany. Making records, music videos, live performances and fashion statements, Chicks on Speed’s practice is a mash-up of different creative disciplines that resists any type of definition.

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At first glance, K8 Hardy‘s work might look like a Cindy Sherman knock-off. But a closer look reveals a more complex aesthetic rooted in gender role playing and fashion. To construct her images, Hardy rummages through thrift shops to find the most disparate clothes to piece together. The ways clothing acts as a definer and shaper of identity is one of the main subjects of her work.[...]

Finishing off DaWire’s one year week-long celebration, today we are revisiting the very first artist interview conducted for the site, featuring a conversation with the Spanish artist collective Aggtelek (Gema Perales and Xandro Vallés, 1978, Barcelona). This interview kicked off a series of conversations that have included artists such as Wilfredo Prieto and Victor Vázquez.[...]

For her performance-based videos, Kate Gilmore gets herself into physically binding situations that are literally difficult to get out of, all the while dressed as a stereotypical suburban housewife with heels. It seems like the most inappropriate attire to walk up a ramp, tear down a wall or get your foot out of a bucket full of hardened cement.[...]

Anna Jane McIntyre’s love of the nighttime spectacle, cheap glamour, the complexity of being human, lights and action has resulted in an obsession with the circus arts. Her work explores animism, social behaviour, movement, the imagined, notions of balance and the powerful allure of the asymmetrical.[...]

Shock full of inventiveness and humor with a rebellious twist, Ivan Argote’s work comments on the ways we traditionally regard art, by shifting the focus from the visual work to very particular actions that question the behaviors we assume within society’s parameters of what is acceptable.[...]