Gordon Douglas
Nieces, Nephews
05.02.2016

Nieces, Nephews marks the first public outcome of a conversation conceived by Gordon Douglas around the seminar ‘Performing Life’ that he and Georgia Horgan attended whilst studying at CalArts. The research has evolved around a common interest with Georgia and Celine in notions of reproduction, documentation and cultural inheritance in performance art and education.

The evening event will be performed by Gordon Douglas and Georgia Horgan

Le Cruel et Curieux Vie Du La Salmonellapod, 2001
Alex Bag and Ethan Kramer

His Girlfriend is a Robot, 1996
Alex Bag

I wonder who’s been around here long enough to know?, 2016
Gordon Douglas

plus a text from Caitlyn Outfit: The Maintenance Guy is Dead; Long Live the Maintenance Guy, 1976$

Alex Bag was born in New York in 1969 and received her BFA from Cooper Union. She is most widely recognised for her ironic performance videos of the 1990s and 2000s, where she performs as multiple personae amidst fragments of pop detritus. Bag grills the tropes of consumer and media culture in droll conceptual parodies that take cue from televisual experience. From 1994-1997, Bag produced a public broadcast television programme ‘Cash From Chaos’ alongside frequent collaborator Patterson Beckwith. With her signature deadpan delivery and deliberately low-tech style, Bag questions how we define ourselves in relation to television, fashion, advertising and the artworld. Her father worked in advertisement, and her mother was the host of a popular children’s television programme – The Carol Corbett Show, which was later renamed The Patchwork Family.

Caitlyn Outfit is the name of a group of artists, thinkers, activists and performers who met and practiced under the United States Federal Witness Protection Program in the 1970s. Originally from different cities across the US, the group were brought together in nearby rural towns in central America. Having such a de-centered locale, the general discourse the group were aware of was greatly mediated by printed material (magazines, journals and books), television, and radio broadcast. The outfit therefore developed their own personal discourse – a thrown-together assemblage of thoughts by contemporaries, as well as ideas born out of their situation as anonymous indebtors to the witness relocation scheme. The Outfit practiced principally through conversation with one another, but had a minor amount of public outlet through self-published text, performance score and sound art.

Gordon Douglas is a performance artist and collaborator living and working in Glasgow, Scotland. He is currently invested in developing alternative models of co-inhabitance, friendship and organisation by instigating working dynamics with artists, designers and practitioners. His father works in investments and his mother works in dementia daycare.

Georgia Horgan is an artist based in Glasgow who uses video, performance, sculpture, appropriation and collaboration to research how histories are represented and politicised. Her father is a mechanic, and her mother formerly owned a travel agency in Surbiton, until the late nineties when she sold the business to become a full-time mother.