A man in a suit carefully empties the contents of a box onto a folding table. He removes three vases and begins arranging three groups of flowers: red, purple and white. As he positions them in the glass containers, a woman in black emerges from inside a stack of tires in the corner of the white-walled room. One by one, she hoists the tires up from around her body and onto the floor. The occasional slap of rubber pierces an otherwise silent gathering of onlookers.
Sounds confusing? Such a performance is not out of place in Cambridge's MEME Gallery in Central Square, a space that since June 2009 has been reserved for experimental performances and otherwise oddball concept art. The shows, like the tire climber who performed on Friday, March 12 as a part of MEME's event "Control Y Control Z," are fleeting and sometimes foreign to those unaccustomed to contemporary performance art, but MEME is carving a space for new ideas in the Cambridge community.
The MEME Team, as members call their clan, consists of six curators: Dirk Adams, Vela Phelan, Alice Vogler, Bradley Benedetti, Sandrine Schaefer and Phil Fryer. The group is made up of artists, and most have been involved in performance for some time, organizing events that were originally held in free venues like Franklin Park and Midway Studios in Fort Point. Many of the spaces in this artists' community, like Midway Studios, are no longer free for the artists to utilize; but as other curators moved out of the Cambridge building now home to MEME, the team sensed a moment of fortuity.
"After the free spaces died out … this came by, and it was our opportunity to have our own space," Phelan said.
"The front windows really offer a lot in terms of people being able to experience what's in here," Adams said, who is a graduate of the School of the Museum of Fine Arts. "It's a really busy neighborhood, so one of the unexpected things is the amount of people in the neighborhood who aren't coming here to see art, but stop by and look in."
With strong ties within the art community in Boston and beyond, the MEME Team has been able to bring in a variety of talent, from the local level to the international one. From Jan. 31 to Feb. 6, artist Eric Scott Nelson, who currently lives in South Korea, visited Boston and contributed a project that extended beyond the walls of the gallery. Nelson wandered around Boston blindfolded during his stay and then produced audio recordings, as well as wall images, based on his experience in MEME's space.
Adams explained the unpredictable nature of curating performance art and the importance of placing faith in an artist's ability to create a successful new piece based on their previous work.
"There's this level of trust that goes into having performance events, and it's played into a lot of things we've had," Adams said. "It's interesting because it's not like we've seen your paintings and want to hang them in a gallery for a few weeks. That kind of curating becomes more about selecting things you have an attachment to, but that's not what we're doing."
Last weekend's event, "Control Y Control Z," featured, among others, Alice Vogler performing "To Enhance the Probability of Survival II" and Cara Brostrom with "Proof/Pudding #11." Vogler's piece encouraged visitors to write down what influences their decisions on slips of paper, which she then attached to syringes and stuck in her own legs.
Heather Zeiden, 27, of Arlington had never been to the gallery before and said that she felt a range of reactions to the performances she witnessed. For Vogler's piece, Zeiden contributed her own written influence: fear. "It was easy to think of something but hard for me to watch her put the needle in," Zeiden said. "It's been a while since I've seen performance art, so I'm really impressed."
Brostrom's performance addressed the audience right from their entrance into the gallery, as she offered to feed visitors Boston cream pie — an act that was being recorded by a video camera. Emerson student L.J. Frezza, 21, enthusiastically partook in the project, chatting with Brostrom between bites. "I guess I had never really thought about small talk as being as significant as it is," Frezza said. "And it kind of put a greater significance on it because of the recording."
Zeiden also participated in Bromstrom's "Proof/Pudding," though she said it produced discomfort for her. "I was embarrassed a little bit to eat in front of people, especially because I wasn't feeding myself," she said. "This was different; it was more intimate, which I think is why I felt uncomfortable.
"[MEME] has a different kind of energy," Phelan said. "There's definitely a different activation going on now with the space ... and the way it functions. We're more active, and that has made more interaction."
MEME will feature performer Kristina Lenzi on March 19. For more information regarding upcoming events, visit memegallery.com.
