PIANO PORTRAITS
By Linda Mary Montano
with Nina Isabelle, & Jennifer Zackin
HiLo
Catskill, NY
February 11, 2018
During these dangerous / confusing / armageddonned times, we are all looking for connection, understanding and warmth. The three of us are committed to providing public art medicine. ART=LIFE=ART. For our PIANO PORTRAITS event at HiLo, we invite audience member-collaborators to sit in a chair on stage to receive a public art healing. Linda Mary Montano will improvise your piano portrait, Nina Isabelle will interpret you through action / movement, and Jennifer Zackin will macrame. Using knots and rope, sunglasses, costumes, blindfolds, action, movement, and sound, we will publicly heal ourselves and you. ART HEALS!
Photos by Adolfo Ibanez Ayerve and Carrie Dashow

Piano Portraits at HiLo with Linda Mary Montano, Nina Isabelle, and Jennifer Zackin. Photo by Adolfo Ibanez Ayerve

Piano Portraits at HiLo with Linda Mary Montano, Nina Isabelle, and Jennifer Zackin. Photo by Adolfo Ibanez Ayerve

Piano Portraits at HiLo with Linda Mary Montano, Nina Isabelle, and Jennifer Zackin. Photo by Adolfo Ibanez Ayerve

Piano Portraits at HiLo with Linda Mary Montano, Nina Isabelle, and Jennifer Zackin. Photo by Adolfo Ibanez Ayerve

Piano Portraits at HiLo with Linda Mary Montano, Nina Isabelle, and Jennifer Zackin. Photo by Adolfo Ibanez Ayerve

Piano Portraits at HiLo with Linda Mary Montano, Nina Isabelle, and Jennifer Zackin. Photo by Adolfo Ibanez Ayerve

Piano Portraits at HiLo with Linda Mary Montano, Nina Isabelle, and Jennifer Zackin. Photo by Adolfo Ibanez Ayerve

Piano Portraits at HiLo with Linda Mary Montano, Nina Isabelle, and Jennifer Zackin. Photo by Adolfo Ibanez Ayerve

Piano Portraits at HiLo with Linda Mary Montano, Nina Isabelle, and Jennifer Zackin. Photo by Adolfo Ibanez Ayerve

Piano Portraits at HiLo with Linda Mary Montano, Nina Isabelle, and Jennifer Zackin. Photo by Adolfo Ibanez Ayerve

LINDA MARY MONTANO is a seminal figure in contemporary feminist performance art and her work since the mid 1960s has been critical in the development of video by, for, and about women. Attempting to dissolve the boundaries between art and life, Montano continues to actively explore her art/life through shared experience, role adoption, and intricate life altering ceremonies, some of which last for seven or more years. Her artwork is starkly autobiographical and often concerned with personal and spiritual transformation. Montano’s influence is wide ranging – she has been featured at museums including The New Museum in New York, MOCA San Francisco and the ICA in London.
www.lindamontano.com
NINA ISABELLE is a process-based multidisciplinary artist working with action and perception. She works to deconstruct sensory input to the extent that meaning becomes shifted and interpretations become a phenomena of psychic imprint. By incorporating physical movement, modified technology, art and non-art objects, her work builds systems of action designed to intuit site-specific information- tethering the collective, personal, and regional relative narratives that drive the performance space machine toward trajectories of new perception, belief, and possibilities. Referencing the inability of communication which is used to visualize reality, the failure of dialogue, the dissonance between form and content, as well as the shortcomings of literal language, Isabelle pushes material and information past the point of recognition in a way that forces a shift in meaning, revealing new information that can transform and challenge the limits of material, perception, and belief. Her work has been exhibited at The San Diego Art Institute, The Bangkok Underground Film Festival, HiLo Catskill, the CICA Museum in South Korea, and most recently, The Mothership in Woodstock, NY.
www.ninaisabelle.com
JENNIFER ZACKIN has been integrating public art, sculpture, installation, performance, collaboration, ceremony, photography, video, collage and drawing into acts of reverence and reciprocity for the past 14 years. Whether wrapping trees in patterns of brightly colored rope, growing medicinal herbs in a public garden for public use, offering large masses of rose petals to oceans and lakes, creating absorbent tentacles ("hair booms") out of salvaged materials to aid in the clean-up efforts of toxic spills, Zackin seeks to engage and create community in her process, bringing art and ritual into everyday life. Every act is an exploration of exchange, communion, performance, skill-sharing and mark-making.
Writing in a cataloque essay about her work Lori Waxman states; “Jennifer Zackin has worked with Rose Petals, Little Plastic Cowboys, pre-Columbian symbols, bright handmade pom-poms, cheap mass-produced posters, coca leaves, and her grandfathers old Super-8 home movies. How she weaves them into rhythmic, often meditative forms depends in great part on the underlying pattern that she is able to detect and orchestrate among her diverse materials.”
Her work has been exhibited in national and international museums, including the Whitney Museum of American Art NY, Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art CT, Spertus Museum - Chicago IL, Rose Museum MA, the Wexner Center for the Arts OH, Contemporary Art Museum - Houston TX, The Henie Onstad Kunstsenter, Høvikodden - Norway, Institute of Contemporary Art - Boston MA and the Zacheta National Art Gallery - Warsaw, Poland. Commissions include Governors Island NYC with LMCC, Katonah Art Museum NY, Socrates Sculpture Park LIC - Queens NY and the Berkshire Botanical Gardens - Stockbridge, MA. She is the recipient of fellowships and residencies, including Factory Direct at Pinchbeck Rose Farm, Art Omi, Atlantic Center for the Arts and the Skowhegan School for Painting and Sculpture.
www.jenniferzackin.com
Event photo: Carrie Dashow