Book Launch: Carriage by Matty Davis and Ben Gould and Sneak Peek Screening of Schroon Lake by Eryka Dellenbach

Carriage is a site-responsive performance by Matty Davis and Ben Gould that radically explores control and empathy. Informed by evolving senses of the body, from injury to trauma, healing, and growth, the work draws from the variance of Davis and Gould’s distinct physicalities to develop a shared language of movement. In this language, empathy is a physical tool, resistance offers stability, and a space is created in which everything is leveled, bringing real fear, awakening, and responsibility.

 

Created in collaboration with designers Ayham Ghraowi and Matt Wolff, this publication includes writing, photographs, and drawings to evoke the urgent physical and interpersonal landscape of Carriage. The artists bear witness to themselves and to each other as they undergo a wide range of physical and emotional dynamics that navigate trust, need, difficulty, and joy. The temporal and spatial experience of Carriage is resituated on the page, as are Davis and Gould's voices, which build off of each other, overlap, and merge as first person singular and plural meet. Their voices are joined by reflections from audience members who attended Carriage in its various locations— aboard a moving vessel on the Chicago River, in a limestone cave network in Kansas City—which offer insight into the viewers’ own bodies and unique physical and psychological spaces.  As these voices combine and accumulate, a broader portrait emerges, not only of a performance, but of the intricacies of human vulnerability, challenge, and care. Carriage is co-published with the Miller ICA at Carnegie Mellon, Pittsburgh in October 2019, and is the third title in the Document Series, an interdisciplinary publishing initiative that highlights work by time-based artists in printed form. 

 

More information Carriage here.

Schroon Lake (2020, 16mm, 14:39) is a film by Eryka Dellenbach in collaboration with artists Matty Davis and Ben Gould. Performance research carried out on the 9-mile long frozen lake in the Adirondacks was captured on expired 16mm film and rearranged through a queer female gaze. The final piece offers an intimate sightline of the unstable space between masculinities, refracted through a winter storm and mutually activated syndromes.

Eryka Dellenbach (she/they) is a Brooklyn-based and Chicago-bred filmmaker, choreographer, performer and teaching artist. Her embodied films and multidisciplinary performance works mine consent, power, beauty and terror through choreographies of designed sensation. They have worked with a broad range of dance and performance artists including Atsushi Takenouchi, Tino Sehgal, Blair Thomas Puppet Theatre, Tori Wränes and Amanda Gutierrez. Eryka has presented work at Movement Research at the Judson Memorial Church, Anthology Film Archives, Gene Siskel, Roulette Intermedium, Virginia Commonwealth University, Intuit Outsider Art Museum, Links Hall, No Nation Gallery, and the Shiryaevo Bienalle of Contemporary Art in Samara, Russia. In 2020 she had her first exhibition at Caravaglia Studio (NY) entitled 'Aftermath & Intimacy' with artist Selva Aparicio. Eryka earned a bachelor’s degree in Cultural Anthropology from the University of Illinois at Chicago, and a master’s degree in Film from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. They are a moving celluloid film instructor at MONO NO AWARE, a HEKLER collaborator, and work freelance as a performer, filmmaker and misc. laborer.