LOCATION: Ornamentum, 506 1/2 Warren Street

VIEWABLE: Thurday - Monday, 11:00 - 5:00, Saturdays until 6pm (Opening Night May 17th till 7:00pm)

PROJECT DESCRIPTION: "LOCKET"

For the first time, Love Artist Kathe Izzo, raising the bar on her commitment to an unconditional, high threshold of intimacy with complete strangers, transcends the physical limitations of her participatory love transactions by permanently embedding a virtual love performance in a finely-wrought pendant. Perpetuating her six-year manifesto to love the world one person at a time, Izzo stowed herself away, alone in farmhouse in the countryside of Vermont, loving the world via video lens. She has boldly embedded her ethereal, whispering, and erotic digital promise into bone and gold and stone with collaborator/conceptual jeweler Jenn Trask, to be viewed exclusively via flash drive through the visceral private world of the personal computer at Ornamentum in Hudson, NY.

"How do you belong to someone? This is what I want: to be supplicant, to surrender, to be absorbed completely, osmosis. I will surrender specificity and belong to absolutely anyone, as long as the surrender itself is absolute and forever…" says The Love Artist. Trask adds, "Bone is considered the absolute reductive essence of our physical selves… While bones seem permanent, they evolve like any cell with an assigned function; bone will break down and re-form, and incorporate evidence of what we ate, how we worked, injuries, traumas, illnesses, and environmental conditions during our lifetime. In this object, the rift is visible in vines refusing containment, growth that confounds expectations. Branches sprout blossoms made of bone. Bones house seeds and grow leaves. Down to the bone."

ABOUT THE ARTIST:

Poet and conceptual performance/installation artist Kathe Izzo is The Love Artist. Working with love ~ childhood, motherhood, sex, and community ~ as a plastic material, Izzo has realized her commitment to the idea of direct energetic transmission as art in various performances and installations such as Theatre of Love @ Harvey Nichols/Manchester (as part of Queer Up North) The Garden of Love @ Cinders Gallery, Brooklyn, This is Forever @ Movement Research, NYC, Musical Theatre Of Love @ Wild Gift, London and, most recently, The Green Heart @ The Kingston Sculpture Biennial, Kingston, NY.

Transcripts of some of her early 80s performances have been included in the infamous Jack Smith collection of writings, WAIT FOR ME AT THE BOTTOM OF THE POOL/Serpent's Tail. Izzo's essays, poetry & memoirs have been included in a plethora of art journals & anthologies, including THE OUTLAW BIBLE OF AMERICAN POETRY/Thundersmouth Press. She is currently working on a memoir, HOW TO BE A LOVE ARTIST.

Over the last six years, I have traveled extensively as a conceptual performance/installation artist using love as a performance medium. Beginning as a purely long distance project, I proposed to love the world, one person at a time, for a day, and afternoon, an hour or an evening (www.trueloveproject.com). These "performances" were available for commission (though unpaid) by both strangers and also those familiar to me. I vowed to fall in love with (virtually) anyone who approached me. Soon, in public venues as varied as experimental theatre festivals, homeless facilities, art galleries/museums and the lingerie department of a major high end department store, I began to set up my True Love Project physically, inviting the public to experience private appointments with me in order to be loved unconditionally with as complete and simple presence as I was capable of.

"There are times when I find my creativity almost unbearable. It rises up inside of me like a Tesla Coil and it's bigger than my physical body can endure. It can work me, run me, a kind of wild intensity that sometimes gets away from me. The daily practice of loving keeps me sane. The more I love, the more I can maintain the ferocity of my own provocation and the more of a chance I have of discovering myself, the secret I didn't know I knew. I want to live on that edge and I want to know how to find it in the dark. I want that intimacy with the world and myself and loving brings me there, loving keeps me there."

Artist website: www.katheizzo.com + www.theloveartist.org

Jenn Trask attended the Massachusetts College of Art completing her BFA in Metalsmithing in 1993 and later graduated the State University of NY at New Paltz with an MFA in 1997. Her work can be seen in several galleries internationally, at SOFA New York and Chicago, as well as the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and the Museum of Arts and Design in New York. Articles and reviews have recently appeared in Metalsmith Magazine, American Craft and The Sunday Boston Globe Arts section, among others.