Ander Mikalson

Churner and Churner is pleased to announce Three’s Company for Eight Performers, a new work by Ander Mikalson. This performance-based installation is constructed from an episode of the television sitcom “Three’s Company” that the artist appeared in as Baby Timmy in 1984. Having catalogued the 543 lines of dialogue, bursts of audience laughter, and ambient sounds in the episode, Mikalson designated each character and sound source to one of eight performers. A group of collaborating artists (Taylor Baldwin, Leah Beeferman, Jesus Benavente, Iris Cushing, John Dombroski, Clare Grill, Alex Hayden, Melanie McLain, Ryan Mrozowski, Becky Sellinger) was given audio files isolated from surrounding sounds and instructions on making a score for his or her chosen instrument, from antique toy piano to viola. With Three’s Company for Eight Performers, Mikalson playfully re-performs an episode she acted in but has no memory of; she renders the voices of the characters mute in order to supplant them with the creative output of her current community of peers.

Like the ensemble cast of “Three’s Company” itself, this team of artists works together, passing the scores from artist to artist, so that each artist performs another’s work. As in Mikalson’s previous pieces – for example, Score for Dinosaurs at the 2013 Queens International at the Queens Museum of Art and Score for Two Dinosaurs (2013) at the ICA-MECA (Institute of Contemporary Art, Portland, Maine), in which the audience creates the sounds, each participant becoming a Foley artist – collaboration is an essential mode of her practice. The artist writes, “Together we can play, take risks, fail spectacularly and interestingly. Often for me the artwork feels like a byproduct of the real thing I am making, that feeling of connection with the universe, of being not alone in it, of belonging to each other, that comes from making something together.”

The performance will take place on Thursday, July 24, and will coincide with the Chelsea Art Walk. From 6 to 8pm, the work will be performed four times. The original scores will be displayed in the gallery along with an audio recording of the performance for the duration of the exhibition.

Ander Mikalson lives and works in New York City. She earned an MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University and a BA from University of California Santa Barbara. Select solo projects include “Score for Two Dinosaurs,” Art, Design & Architecture Museum, Santa Barbara and Queens Museum, Queens (2014); “Score for a Dinosaur,” Temple Contemporary, Philadelphia (2013); “Score for a Cyclone,” Tensta Konsthall, Stockholm, Sweden; and “Music of the Spheres,” The Anderson Gallery Carriage House, Richmond (both 2012). Her work has also been included in recent group shows such as “Select 2014,” curated by Gregory Volk, Artisphere, Arlington; and “Recuperative Tactics,” curated by Lisi Raskin, Art in General, New York (both 2014); and “Approaching Infinity,” Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento (2013).