Project Research Description

Using intense awareness in public and private spaces, Eileen Standley uses her body as a tool to track the edges and interiors of her and her environment. Jen Urso uses this same awareness to track the edges of Standley’s movement to record it in blind gesture drawings on paper or on public surfaces. By addressing one another and their environment carefully, they highlight the desire to seek out the overt, sensational and spectacular. Their work becomes the reverse. This heightened practice of paying attention—acknowledging the impact of a person, building, or movement in space—are things happening here and now. The artists believe these micro-movements and presences are something we are always in tune with but tend to block out, distracted by the allure of something more spectacular. As artists who have built their separate practices on the subtle, intricate and complex, they believe that this sensibility they have honed can be used as a force to slow down and share a general awareness, acceptance and tenderness that appears to often be lacking in our society. The resulting blind gesture drawings, left on paper or in the performed space, become a record of a small moment, constantly in movement.