Melissa Wyman’s Backwards Beasts is the marrying of two participatory projects that explore the awkward and symbiotic nature of interpersonal relationships. Collaborating with intimate partners, total strangers, and her 14 month old daughter, she utilizes wrestling and backwards gestures to seek out the transition (and oscillation) between forced and fluid moments: when ‘foreign’ or strange actions appear ‘natural’ and vice versa.
Melissa Wyman (b. 1976 on an intentional community called The Farm) is an interdisciplinary artist who investigates interpersonal exchanges and hybrid notions of belonging. Her work is often participatory and incorporates performance, video, installation, drawing, painting, the occasional object and Social Practice based projects. She received an MFA from the California College of the Arts in San Francisco, a Post Graduate Diploma in Art and Art Theory from Massey University in Wellington, New Zealand and a BA from the University of California, Santa Cruz. After years of intercontinental time splitting, she now resides fulltime in Northern California. Her publications include a book called Fight Therapy: A Discussion about Agency, Art and the Reverse Triangle Choke and various other writings on wrestling and cross-cultural interaction.
At Right Window, artist Jason Hanasik has turned November into a running series of individual shows under the general title of You roll away your stone, I’ll roll away mine.
You roll away your stone, I’ll roll away mine is a series of week long solo exhibitions. Noticing the generative nature of the intergenerational