ALAN FLEMING and MICHAEL FLEMING

STATEMENT

It is our intent as artists to challenge the way urban space is understood through the physical body. Together, we have developed a collaborative practice which explores issues of identity, space and the body. Our work incorporates a combination of improvisational play and predetermined movements to subvert and reveal prescribed modes of interaction in a given space. Employing performance, video and photography, we are interested in the role of the audience as spectators and the impact that has on their physical experience. Attempting to instill an empathic bodily response in the viewer, we hope to recontextualize the way people relate to their surroundings.

Our work is heavily influenced by our shared interest in physicality and movement. All of our projects begin with either the body or the site. Alternative sports like skateboarding and le parkour treat the city as a playground. We are interested in this reappropriation of space through bodily movement. We draw from a diverse set of movement disciplines to create our own physical vocabulary.

ABOUT US

We currently live and work in Chicago. We are both MFA candidates in the performance department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. In 2007 we graduated from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign with BFA degrees in painting. We have been working collaboratively since 2005 and we have been twin brothers since 1985. Our work has been exhibited nationally and internationally. In the spring of 2006 we were awarded the "Group 3 Award" from the Foundry Art Centre for our video "Defining the Frame". In January of 2008 our video series "At Rest: The Body in Architecture" was nominated and won the "Performing" section of the “Kinolewchyk Festival” at the Idea Museum in Lviv, Ukraine. We were both awarded "Trustee Merit Scholarships" from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and share the award of "Most Outstanding Senior" in the painting program from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.