TBA:07 ON SITE

SARA GREENBERGER RAFFERTY

“Is this comedy, or what? Now you know it’s not comedy—it’s pissing on the velvet, that’s what I’m doing. It’s comedy. It’s comedy that gets laughs. It’s not funny. It’s the same question: Is this painting?” —Lenny Bruce

Sara Greenberger Rafferty has always worked in a performative vein: while never actually taking the stage, an absent performer has always seemingly orchestrated the objects and pictures she presents. With the exception of a handful of videos, Rafferty’s recent work engages notions of performance while evading the traditional markers of time-based art.

For her installation at TBA:07, Rafferty continues to explore models of solitary performance, stand-up comedy, and pathos. Installed in the center of a large warehouse space, in front of a grand red curtain, will be a diminutive double-sided structure that straddles a line between scaffold and soapbox. On one side is barely room for a small person to mount a stool for a one man show, on the other a small eye level video screen. Engaging notions of participation, without explicitly inviting it, the emptiness of the stage presents a tense or terse moment, drawn out over the duration of the installation. On the opposite side of the space, mounted seven feet above the floor, will be a row of shelves with figurative sculptures sitting on top of them. The final, and most overtly dramatic element, will consist of an amplified atmospheric sound work.

Rafferty is an artist working in Red Hook, Brooklyn. Her work has been exhibited in New York at venues including P.S. 1, Artists Space, Mary Boone Gallery, Wallspace Gallery, K.S. Art, Andrew Kreps Gallery; at Sandroni Rey Gallery and Champion Fine Art in Los Angeles; Sutton Lane in Paris; ARTSPACE in Auckland, New Zealand; and in Pescara, Italy. She is the co-editor of the annual publication North Drive Press. Her own writing about art and comedy has been published in several notable art and culture publications.

This performance is made possible in part by the Kristy Edmunds Fund for New Work.