Frankenstein

Smack Mellon is pleased to present a one-night performance in conjunction with Avram Finkelstein’s solo exhibition, Something Terrible Has Happened (Corpus Fluxus). Developed by the artist in collaboration with choreographer Miguel Gutierrez and musician and composer Conrad Tao, the performance will activate the porous space of Finkelstein’s exhibition and feature movement by dancer Amit Noy.

A subject insistently represented within various aesthetic canons, the body may be the defining matrix of identity. The body is also the unavoidable core around which all forms of displacement are organized, from gender to gentrification, from forced migration to racial reckoning. So how do we represent a thing at once universal yet specific, dense yet porous? If art is meant to explain meaning, to what extent is meaning gestural and resistant to depiction? Other than reflecting ourselves as objects for consumption, what actually is representation, and what is it for?

In Jewish Hermetic Mysticism, the golem is a being formed from clay and animated to provide protection. But when the golem misinterprets its directive, it can morph into an avenger, a monstrosity. Here, the golem is a metaphor for both weakness and power. In reaction to my disobedient body, which is increasingly beyond my control, I wanted to craft a temporal collaboration that performs disability, in defiance of the systems of valuation implied by visual art practices.

Miguel Gutierrez, Conrad Tao, and Amit Noy are the perfect partners to help me explore the ways sound and movement can modify meaning-making. Conrad originally trained on the violin, but rarely performs it in public, and sees the mutable variations of hand, string and bow as sonic articulations of the evanescence I refer to in my drawings. And Miguel is suggesting that the counterpoint of Amit’s body and my own hints at deeper conclusions about corporeality.

– Avram Finkelstein, 2025

Miguel Gutierrez (he/him) is an artist and educator living between Lenapehoking/Brooklyn, NY and Tovaangar/Los Angeles. His work continues and expands the legacy of experimental QTPOC artists and creates empathetic, irreverent, and reflective spaces that prioritize attention as a means to unravel normative belief systems. He is also fascinated by how capital interacts with art making, a topic he explored in his podcast Are You For Sale? Recent performance work includes Super Nothing, a dance blueprint for queer survival developed as the Randjelović/Stryker Resident Commissioned Artist at New York Live Arts, and a music project called sueño, which premiered in 2022 at the High Line Festival. His work has been presented internationally for over twenty years in venues such as Festival D’Automne in Paris, On the Boards, Brooklyn Academy of Music, Festival Universitario in Colombia, and as a selected artist in the 2014 Whitney Biennial. He is a Guggenheim Fellow, a United States Artists Fellow, and a recipient of a Foundation for Contemporary Art award, a 2016 Doris Duke Artist Award, a 2016 Frankie Award, and four New York Dance and Performance “Bessie” Awards. He has received project support multiple times through the National Performance Network, MAP Fund, and the New England Foundation for the Arts’ National Dance Project. www.miguelgutierrez.org

Amit Noy is a dancer, choreographer, and writer. Raised in Oahu, Hawai’i and Aotearoa New Zealand, he now lives and works in Marseille, France. For the past few years, Amit has been creating performances with his family members that mash genres, archives, and aesthetic materials together. Their evening-length collaboration A Big Big Room Full of Everybody’s Hope premiered at Théâtre de la Ville—Paris in September 2023, and is currently touring.

Amit is a recipient of the Pina Bausch Fellowship for Dance and Choreograph, and a Springboard laureate of the Arts Foundation of New Zealand. He writes on dance and performance for publications including Artforum, BOMB Magazine, the Brooklyn Rail, and Gagosian Quarterly. This summer, he will premiere a new solo work at Festival Montpellier Danse. At present, he spends his time dealing with the sacred confusion of French bureaucracy. https://amitnoy.com/

Conrad Tao is a musician and composer, known for his dynamic interpretations of the classical canon, and his expansive array of solo and collaborative projects, recognized for their programming ingenuity and risk-taking.

As a soloist, Tao has performed with the Boston Symphony, Chicago Symphony, Cleveland Orchestra, Los Angeles Philharmonic, New York Philharmonic, the Orchestra Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, and more. As a composer, his work has been commissioned and performed by orchestras worldwide. His first large-scale orchestral work, Everything Must Go, received its world premiere with the New York Philharmonic and its European premiere with the Antwerp Symphony. Recent commissioners include the Kansas City Symphony, Jacksonville Symphony, and Los Angeles Philharmonic.

Tao received the 2021 Yvar Milkhashoff Prize, recognizing his support for living composers, and the 2024 Andrew Wolf Award, celebrating his contributions as a chamber musician. He has received an Avery Fisher Career Grant and was a 2012 Gilmore Young Artist. conradtao.com

Installation view, Avram Finkelstein, Something Terrible Has Happened (Corpus Fluxus), 2025. Image courtesy of Smack Mellon. Photo by Etienne Frossard.

Host or Publisher Smack Mellon