Melvin "GRAVE" Guzman
CAVE 
Sat, June 18, 7–9pm 
live performance at 8pm

‘a psycho-geographical impressed simulation exhorting the specters of interiority. a haunting; caricature emanations assaulting the orifices to sense — the counter initiation of the episteme’s ritual spectacles of the self — the diffusion of objecthood and subjecthood; the imperceptible will.’

What is it to perceive or be perceived? To occupy space? To be present in a time? What of an age imprisoned by the hubris and authority given to percept orifices as the arbiters of what is? A luminal tyranny settles such orientation like sediment.

The epoch seeks to situate the Other as “just so” through various mediating luminal projections cohering an apparatus of kitsch, sustaining itself on the impersonal machinic surfaces of the technological age, emitting photons, synthesizing imaging, all to boot up and render a violence akin to the gnostic Big Bang — the vertices and virtualities of the spectacle. CAVE, ala GRAVE, an affectionate homage to Plato and his machinations in The Republic, is an attempt to repurpose the reductive units that serve as the muscle tissue and bone marrow of modern simulation to orchestrate a genuine encounter with the Other; an alignment of one’s interior world with the “outer world.” A captive audience not by chains or scrupulous presentation of the ideal, but by an enchanting exposition and conjuring of the absurdities of difference and the ritual reconciliation of such. A groove out of smooth leading to a petit salvation. – Woodson Legrand

On Saturday, June 18, PARTICIPANT INC presents CAVE, an installation and live performance by Melvin "GRAVE" Guzman. The site of performance will include a preliminary video projection premiering the coinciding short, RUNS, that regards the collection of metal elements that comprise the work's structure, a sculptural installation with an olfactory element, and a live score by Brian Close. A cage made of repurposed steel armatures serves as support for heavily layered paintings and reclaimed or 'saved' items of refuse, building an abbreviated lexicon of the immediate urban space. A scavenged satellite dish with flashlights taped to its antennae provides self-illumination of the performance.