Night of Performance at legation, a gallery Works by Lynda Abraham, Ryan McDaniel, Ryan Charles Ramer & Jaclyn Surso Friday May 18th, 2012 Performances scheduled from 6:00- 9:00pm Legation, a gallery 1300 West 78 th Street Cleveland, OH 44102 www.legationagallery.com Artist Lynda Abraham’s fascination with human behavior drives her to invent contraptions that alter human behavior, challenging the artist physically and her audiences mentally. On Friday, May 18, in legation gallery, she and three other performance-based artists will provoke Cleveland’s collective conscience. Abraham’s piece, “Having no Alternative/ Gone too Far”, will be performed at 6:30 and 8:30pm. One part sculpture, one part performance art, the piece explores electrical indulgence and its effect on the consumer. As a literal part of the work, the artist propels her contraption, which inflates, creates sound and lights up as it devours electricity with accompanying audio spewing commentary from alternative energy nay-sayers (Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, Rudolph Giuliani and others). Symbolic of America’s over-inflated sense and sensibility of “power”, Abraham’s piece highlights the dark side of our reliance on electricity. Abraham, a resident of Queens and creator of Williamsburg, Brooklyn’s Hope Street artist community, has been on the Cleveland art scene for a year. She is one of three artists past and future to participate in a residency designed and supported by local experience artist Melissa Daubert, an Ingenuity Fest board member. Ryan McDaniel, a current Cleveland Institute of the Arts student, will be performing from 7-8:30pm. Ryan will be producing one of his “Anxiety” installations, consuming space in the gallery with a repetitive process of breathing into paper bags, referencing an escape to his own anxiety through hyperventilation. He then secures the bags to walls, ceilings and floors, creating surreal places that allude to a sense of comfort. Ryan Charles Ramer, a member the Cleveland Composers Guild, will be performing new musical pieces, “Songs for Soprano and Toy Piano.” Ryan was awarded an Individual Excellence Grant from the Ohio Arts Council this year, and was contracted to organize two Cleveland performances. Ryan, the composer and accompanist, will be performing with Jaclyn Surso, the Soprano, in the gallery from 6:00- 6:30pm.