Emily Mast. The Cage is a Stage

Blackwood Gallery and The Power Plant are pleased to present The Cage is a Stage, a new project by Los Angeles-based artist Emily Mast. In her choreographed performances and installations, Mast incorporates bodies, movement, sound, and light as live sculptural material. Her work emerges from a collaborative practice that confounds the space between art, theatre, dance, and poetry. Mast often enlists literary devices and grammatical tools—addendum, appendix, epilogue, footnote, prologue—in order to allow her work to unfold iteratively in various sites. This strategy comes from her longstanding interest in the imprecision of language, the unreliability of memory, and the value of inaccuracy as it relates to systems of belief in contemporary society.

The Cage is a Stage is a multi-compositional project comprised of two gallery exhibitions at the Blackwood Gallery and an evening-length performance that premieres onstage at The Power Plant’s Harbourfront Centre Theatre. The project examines some of the deep-seated compulsions of the human species, such as the need to control, tame, punish and play by scrutinizing what is specifically bestial. Mast will construct a landscape of stylized vignettes in order to expand on ideas that John Berger put forth in his essay “Why Look at Animals” (1977), in which he compares zoos to art galleries. Stating that each cage acts as a frame around the animal inside it, he proposes that visitors stroll from cage to cage in the zoo much like they stroll from artwork to artwork in an exhibition. Like theatre sets, the zoo décor is pure illusion, and what is outside of these delusory environments therefore holds the promise of being “real.” As a result, what’s inside becomes a fictionalized account of the “natural,” thus revealing more about who we are as storytellers than the subject of the story itself.

Co-curated by Julia Paoli and Christine Shaw

Artist Biography

Emily Mast (born in Akron, Ohio, 1976) recently staged a solo “choreographed exhibition” called Missing Missing at La Ferme du Buisson in Noisiel, France, and an 18-part roving procession of performances based on the poetry of Joan Brossa at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). In addition, her video, installation, and performance work was part of the Hammer Museum’s Made in L.A. Biennial (2014). Mast’s performances have been exhibited at venues including: China Art Objects Galleries, Los Angeles (2015); Mona Bismarck American Center, Paris (2015); Silencio, Paris (2015); Night Gallery, Los Angeles (2014); Robert Rauschenberg Foundation Project Space, New York (2013); Public Fiction, Los Angeles (2012); REDCAT, Los Angeles (2012); MUHKA, Antwerp (2011); Human Resources, Los Angeles (2010) and Performa, New York (2009). Mast has received numerous awards including a Harpo Foundation Grant (2013); Center for Cultural Innovation Investing in Artists Grant (2013); Franklin Furnace Fund Grant (2013); and a California Community Foundation Fellowship (2012). In 2009 Mast graduated with a Masters in Fine Arts from the University of Southern California and has been an artist-in-residence at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture; the Headlands Center for the Arts in Sausalito; and Yaddo in Saratoga Springs.