CEPA Gallery : Conversation Pieces

Sharon Hayes – Everything Else Has Failed, Don't You Think It's Time for Love?

In a series of performances (and audio/photo/video installations derived from those performances) stretching from 2005's In the Near Future to 2008's Revolutionary Love, Sharon Hayes has staged a set of anachronistic, speculative, deliberately and sometimes joyously off-kilter investigations into the figure of the protester. These actions have ranged from lone protests with signs from bygone eras to the public reading of love letters in political arenas. For Conversation Pieces, Hayes will present the 2005 project Everything Else Has Failed, Don't You Think It's Time for Love?, five recordings of public speeches performed by Hayes in midtown New York on five successive days. The public speeches, whose presentation on large tripod-mounted speakers reinforces their ‘authoritative' position, have very private texts; each is, in fact, the reading of a love letter to an audience of strangers in a public space,