Tony Orrico, Grant Wood Fellow in Interdisciplinary Performance, will discuss how he approaches drawing and object making through performance. He will share the components of his body practice, Suspension, and its influence on his visual work over the past ten years. In Orrico’s early series, Penwald Drawings and Carbon, works meditate on select parameters and permutations of the same materials: body, paper, and graphite. Orrico will describe how he generates movement and momentum from a felt state of consciousness that is hyper-relational, propelled by actual sensation in the body and projections of sensation throughout space. He will share new work in development, Four Hand Draw and A continued gesture towards us, utilizing a methodology that brings other bodies into the fold.

Tony Orrico’s work has reached mass circulation for its ingenuity within the intersections of performance and drawing. He has performed/exhibited his work across the US and internationally in Australia, Belgium, China, Denmark, France, Germany, Mexico, the Netherlands, Poland, and Spain. His work is in the permanent collections of The National Academy of Sciences (Washington, DC) and Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporáneo (Mexico City, Mexico), as well as prominent private collections. He has presented at the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona (Spain), Centre Pompidou-Metz (France), The New Museum (New York, NY), and Poptech 2011: The World Rebalancing (Camden, ME). Orrico was one of a select group of artists to re-perform the work of Marina Abramović during her retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art (New York, NY) in 2010. As a former member of Trisha Brown Dance Company and Shen Wei Dance Arts, Orrico has performed on renowned stages such as the Sydney Opera House (Australia), Teatro La Fenice (Venice, Italy), New York State Theater (New York, NY), and Theatre du Palais-Royal (Paris, France).