If you’re just reading about this now, we missed it! However, this performance is so brilliant and so inspiring, that I still wanted to post.
Kathryn Cornelius: Save The Date
A performance at The Corcoran Gallery of Art Washington, DC
Saturday, August 11, 2012 10 am – 5 pm
Curator’s Office is delighted to invite you to Save the Date, a performance by artist Kathryn Cornelius that explores the life cycle of marriage and divorce and the wedding ceremony’s complex mix of private emotion, public spectacle, social expectation, and state power. This project is part of the performance art series Take it to the Bridge hosted by The Washington Project for the Arts and The Corcoran Gallery of Art and is a part of the Free Summer Saturdays at The Corcoran Gallery of Art.
Over the course of seven hours, Kathryn Cornelius will exchange vows with seven suitors. Each wedding ceremony will be followed by a champagne toast, cupcakes, a first dance and then, finally, the signing of divorce papers. A legal wedding officiant will perform the ceremonies, while the signing of divorce papers will be overseen by a divorce attorney.
The ceremonies will begin on the hour, every hour, and run from 10am through 5pm. The seven suitors selected to wed the artist include performance artists Eames Armstrong, Holly Bass, and Andrew Bucket, writer and filmmaker Stephen Mack, art collector and physician Dr. Fred Ognibene, research scientist Dr. John Royer, and software engineer Antowne Walters. Cornelius invited proposals through the project website and personally selected six suitors. The seventh suitor was selected by a public vote, through the project’s Facebook page.
Save the Date approaches the topic of marriage, weddings, and divorce with both humor and gravity. This ceremony, and the attendant legal document, has, throughout history and across cultures, separated state-sanctioned and socially approved relationships from those deemed immoral, unacceptable, or simply unthinkable. In the midst of the debate over marriage equality and ever-present concerns over the frequency of divorce, Save the Date invites the viewer to consider the meaning of marriage as a lifetime commitment, a social ritual, a legal institution, and a public declaration of love.
For more on Save the Date, visit http://savethedatedc.tumblr.com and follow the project on Twitter @SaveTheDateDC.
Check out HuffPost Photos and Press at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/10/save-the-date-corcoran_n_1765556.html
Kathryn Cornelius is an interdisciplinary artist working in performance, video, photography, text, sounds, and sculpture. She is represented in the United States by Curator’s Office in Washington, DC. Her work has been exhibited nationally in cities such as New York, Miami, Philadelphia, Washington, DC, and Baltimore and internationally in Frankfurt, Germany, Herford, Germany, Barcelona, Spain, and Naples, Italy. Kathryn Cornelius will present an exhibition of works from the Save The Date performance in 2013 at Curator’s Office in Washington, DC.
Photo credit: Bruno Venini Washington Project for the Arts Corcoran Gallery of Art: Take It To The Bridge Curator’s Office
