Fritz Welch and Andre Stitt at the lab

-click here to check it out live (Click the play button on the video window for the live feed)

The Lab Gallery is pleased to present SHIFTwork by Andre Stitt and Fritz Welch, curated by Robert Curcio of Curcioprojects. SHIFTwork is a collaborative installation/performance that will investigate the perceptions of the artist’s method of production as “work” and the artist as a cultural worker. The space becomes a public studio for the exploration of the artist as “common worker” and an artistic activity that exposes the performance of painting as labor and cultural practice. This activity takes the form of a series of work “shifts” that reflect labor patterns and “shiftwork” activity throughout the city.

From April 9th to 16th the public can view the artists on the job working/painting on a series of “live” in-situ works through the large windows of the corner street level gallery during their assigned shifts; see above schedule. During rush hour (5:30 – 6:30pm) on April 16th, Stitt and Welch will have a live akshun performance within the space where they will dismantle, cut-up, and construct new works from the debris of the paintings they were just working on for distribution to the public, at no cost to them, before becoming marketable products available through curcioprojects. The residual installation and products/art will be on view until April 24th.

SHIFTwork is the first collaborative piece by Stitt and Welch. Internationally renowned cult performance artist, Andre Stitt first met a teenaged Fritz Welch, during a performance at the Commerce Street Artist’s Warehouse in Houston, Texas in 1989. They kept in communication with each other over the years and when Welch, now a sonic/visual artist, was curating Acute Zonal Occult Outer, a series of performances at The Drawing Center, NYC in 2006 he invited Stitt to create a piece.