Preview: Thursday 5 October, 6 - 8.30pm
Exhibition continues: 6 October – 8 December 2023
Opening hours: Wednesday - Friday, 11am - 5pm
(or by appointment)
Constance DeJong: IT’S ALWAYS NIGHT
Live Performance and Conversation: Tuesday 10 October, from 7.45-9.15pm.
Venue open from 7.15pm
IKLECTIK
20 Carlisle Lane
London SE1 7LG
Free, but booking needed:
https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/constance-dejong-its-always-night-tickets-707337604817?aff=oddtdtcreator
Live performance event from the renowned American artist, Constance DeJong, in connection to the solo exhibition On a Continuous Present at Chelsea Space. Comprising material from DeJong’s expansive career, the exhibition and accompanying event highlights DeJong's iterative approach to art making — where language, text and image making combine — to further complicate our understanding of where an art work begins and ends. First visiting London in 1976 to perform Modern Love, a spoken-word performance derived from her experimental novel of the same name, DeJong’s experiments with writing include self-publishing; founding the imprint Standard Editions in 1976 to publish her own work.
This evening event will revisit Modern Love alongside other works, and will include a conversation between the artist, and Chelsea Space curator Karen Di Franco.
Performance and conversation from 7.45-9.15pm. Venue open from 7.15pm.
Constance DeJong (born 1945, Ohio) is an American artist, writer, and performer, producing texts and new media-based work for performance and theatre, audio, and video installations. A prominent figure in the 1970s and '80s New York City downtown art scene, DeJong has also been an influential teacher and mentor to a generation of aspiring artists; she taught on the Hunter College MFA Studio Art Program between the 1990s - 2020. Her work has been presented at Renaissance Society, Chicago; the Walker Art Museum, Minneapolis, MN; The Wexner Center, Columbus, OH; Philadelphia Museum of Art; and in New York at The Kitchen, Threadwaxing Space, The Whitney Museum of American Art and the Dia Center for the Arts. She composed the libretto for the Philip Glass opera Satyagraha in 1983, which has been staged at opera houses worldwide, including the Metropolitan Opera, NY; The Netherlands National Opera, Rotterdam, NL, and The Brooklyn Academy of Music, NY. Her first book Modern Love (1976) was reprinted in 2018 and Reader, a collection of 18 works that reflect the multiple forms of DeJong’s language, was published in 2022, both by Primary Information. Constance DeJong is represented by Bureau, New York: https://bureau-inc.com/artists/constance-dejong/works