Exhibition: Speakchamber

Bureau is honored to announce the new production by seminal text and performance artist Constance DeJong, SpeakChamber. During the month of May, Bureau will be transformed into an intimate theater to host DeJong's hour-long spoken performance derived from a work of prose and accompanied by recorded sound and moving image.

DeJong has worked for over three decades on narrative form within the context of avant-garde music and contemporary art. The fiction in SpeakChamber focuses on the world of inanimate objects through styles and histories. We follow DeJong's story from dusty homes to salvation armies and from war-torn mountain ranges to luxury consignment shops. DeJong writes her narrative work specifically for the medium in which it will be presented, for the physical page or for the mouth as spoken in the present moment. In performance, her audience follows the captivating auteur, live, telling the story of objects through a continuous present moment.

DeJong is considered one of the progenitors of video and media art, what can be referred to as 'time based media'. She shapes her art of narrative with an intricate attention to content and literary form. Each detail is scrutinized so that every moment is an eternity and an expanse. The work is presented as a continuous present flowing from the mouth of the artist, in real time. The work thus stands both in contrast and in recognition of the contemporary attention-deficient media genre, which she has helped define. The work is one of continuous language paired with continuous video imagery that unfolds conjuring new images of some combined fiction derived from the seen image and heard text.

Nothing says impermanency like the relentless sequence of one word giving way to the next, each one dropping out of sight. -CDJ

Constance DeJong has exhibited and performed both locally and internationally over the past three decades at venues such as, the Walker Art Museum, Minneapolis MN; The Wexner Center, Columbus OH; Philadelphia Museum of Art; and in New York at The Kitchen, Threadwaxing Space, The Whitney Museum of American Art and the Dia Center for the Arts. She composed the libretto for the Philip Glass opera Satyagraha in 1983 which has been staged at opera houses worldwide including the Metropolitan Opera, NY; The Netherlands National Opera, Rotterdam, NL and The Brooklyn Academy of Music, NY. She has had several books of fiction published including Modern Love (Standard Editions, 1977) and I.T.I.L.O.E (Top Stories, 1983)

This exhibition will be accompanied by a limited edition publication, SpeakChamber.