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Alex Bag, Fancy Pants, 1997, Video Still, 15 minutes, 19 seconds.

Alex Bag, The Van, 2001, Video Still, 11 minutes.

Alex Bag, Untitled (Fall '95), 1995, Video Still, 57 minutes, 29 seconds.

Whitney Museum
of American Art
945 Madison Avenue
at 75th Street
New York, NY 10021
800-944-8639
Anne & Joel Ehrenkranz
Lobby Gallery
Alex Bag
Opens January 9, 2009

For her first solo museum presentation, Alex Bag debuts a newly commissioned video installation she has made for the Whitney Museum of American Art, inspired by a popular and progressive 1970s children's syndicated television show, The Patchwork Family. Continuing the commentary on contemporary media culture that has characterized her work to date, Bag re-imagines the earlier TV show, in a darkly satiric vein, peopling her studio audience with real-life children. The children are regaled by — and react to — the show’s special guests, an assortment of characters including an abstract artist, an animal wrangler, a wizard, a psycho-pharmacologist, and others.

In the 1970s, The Patchwork Family, like the earlier 1960s WPIX-TV show The Carol Corbett Show, featured Bag’s mother as the hostess, sitting behind a desk with a puppet, interviewing guests and singing songs. Bag herself appeared as a guest on The Patchwork Family at a very young age. In the artist's current version, she plays the role of the hostess in a satirical take on the chipper, optimistic 70s prototype, now prone to depression and a darker world view, colored by Bag’s own mordant vision and complete with commercial breaks. Bag also uses footage from
the original show, moving back and forth in time.

Alex Bag is well known for her work in video. She was born in 1969 in New York City, and currently lives and works in New Jersey. She received her BFA from Cooper Union. Her work has been shown at P.S. 1, the Tate, the Centre Georges Pompidou, the Museum of Modern Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and other spaces internationally. She has performed at The Knitting Factory and lectured at Yale, Parsons, Cal Arts, and the Getty Research Institute. This is her first solo museum show.

Whitney Museum
of American Art
945 Madison Avenue
at 75th Street
New York, NY 10021
800-944-8639
William Eggleston: Democratic Camera
— Photographs
and Video
November 7, 2008-
January 25, 2009

Nearly 50 years of extraordinary image-making by the photographer William Eggleston will be presented in a major retrospective, William Eggleston: Democratic Camera — Photographs and Video, 1961-2008, at the Whitney Museum of American Art from Friday, November 7, 2008, through Sunday, January 25, 2009. Organized by the Whitney in association with Haus der Kunst, Munich, the exhibition is the most comprehensive yet devoted to Eggleston in this country. It is co-curated by Elisabeth Sussman, Whitney curator and Sondra Gilman Curator of Photography, and Thomas Weski, deputy director of the Haus der Kunst in Munich, where the show travels (February 20-May 17, 2009), following its Whitney debut. The exhibition’s lead sponsor is W magazine.

William Eggleston: Democratic Camera traces the artist’s evolution from the beginnings of his career some 50 years ago to the present day, and includes more than 150 photographs, some never-before-exhibited, as well as the artist’s rarely screened video diary of his legendary nocturnal wanderings, “Stranded in Canton.” A key figure in American photography, Eggleston, who was born in 1939 in Memphis, is credited with almost single-handedly ushering in the era of color photography. The psychological intensity of the saturated color in Eggleston’s pictures has had an enormous impact on the entire field of photography; as an influence, Eggleston has cited the Technicolor technique in the films of Alfred Hitchcock.

Co-curator Elisabeth Sussman notes, “Eggleston’s sense of color and composition is impeccable. His work is marked by a deep concern with equal consideration and evenhanded treatment of all his subjects. He knows and loves his terrain: the new supermarkets, sidewalks, driveways, patios, shiny cars, dinner settings, gas stations, and houses of the middle class, the interiors of elegant old Southern homes, the bars and their habitués. He captures landscape and architecture in unexpected ways — for instance his famous view upwards to the ceiling in a red room, or the empty space of a green tiled bathroom. And, importantly, Eggleston, though not a portraitist in a traditional sense, has a cool, but not uncomplicated view of the people he often photographs in these environments.”

The show begins with Eggleston’s early black-and-white photographs and covers his groundbreaking shift to color and his dye transfer work of the early 1970s. Highlights from the last 20 years include selections from the Graceland series and The Democratic Forest, Eggleston’s anthology of the quotidian. An unparalleled chronicler of the American South, Eggleston has produced a veritable encyclopedia of the Southern vernacular. His focus has been primarily upon his native locales of Memphis, New Orleans, and the Mississippi River Delta, although his commissioned projects have taken him all over the world.

In the mid-1970s, Eggleston became famous as a photographer. His color photographs, printed in the rich dye transfer medium, were recognized by The Museum of Modern Art’s curator John Szarkowski, who showed them in 1976 in a historic and controversial exhibition at the museum. With this one-person show and the accompanying book, William Eggleston’s Guide, Eggleston emerged as the first color photographer of note in America, the first to make color an issue in an art photography context.

Eggleston’s trademark photograph is snapshot-like. It is an intuitive response to a fleeting configuration of elements in the tradition of Henri Cartier-Bresson, whom he greatly admired and in whose credo of The Decisive Moment he has found a counterpart to his own life’s work. As co-curator Thomas Weski writes in the exhibition catalogue, “In many of his early pictures, the observer gets the feeling that Eggleston composed the photograph only roughly and accepted everything that fell within the established frame. This approach led to prints that integrated the unpredictable into the picture and thus accepted the stroke of chance. For Eggleston, everything in front of the camera was basically worthy of a picture.”

The exhibition includes Eggleston’s cult video work, Stranded in Canton. Eggleston and a friend had begun using film to document Fred McDowell, a well-known Delta blues musician, but they ultimately abandoned the film project. Eggleston later acquired a video camera and began using video to shoot in bars and in people's homes; sometimes he shot monologues of friends delivered for his video camera, most often at night. The result, “Stranded in Canton,” recently rediscovered and re-edited, is a portrait of a woozy subculture that adds dimension and texture to the world of Eggleston’s color photographs. As Sussman writes, “Though the epic, multi-episodic project Stranded in Canton cannot be described as a nocturnal work in its entirety, its mood is nonetheless established by the fact that many episodes were shot late at night. It is thus in contrast to the well-known color work, where the powers of color and light are absolutely keyed to Eggleston’s daytime vision. In his video work, the photographer was able to give visual shape to a demimonde in which he was both participant and observer.”

The exhibition is accompanied by a full-color catalogue that provides new insight into the ways in which Eggleston’s photography has influenced generations of American artists, filmmakers, writers, and public perceptions of art. It includes essays by co-curators Elisabeth Sussman and Thomas Weski; Whitney Chief Curator and Associate Director of Programs Donna De Salvo; Senior Curatorial Assistant Tina Kukielski; and noted American music journalist Stanley Booth. The publication includes an illustrated chronology, checklist of the exhibition, list of publications, selected exhibition history, selected bibliography, and index. It is co-distributed by Yale University Press.

Elisabeth Sussman, Whitney curator and the Museum’s Sondra Gilman Curator of
Photography, recently curated the Whitney’s acclaimed exhibition Gordon Matta-Clark: You Are the Measure. Her latest photography project was the celebrated 2003-04 Diane Arbus: Revelations, the first retrospective of this controversial and highly influential photographer since 1972; it opened at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), then traveled to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and elsewhere in the U.S. and abroad, including the Victoria & Albert Museum in London. She is currently organizing a Whitney exhibition on Paul Thek.

Thomas Weski is deputy director of the Haus der Kunst, Munich. As chief curator there from 2003 to 2008, his exhibitions included Andreas Gursky (2007); Click Doubleclick — The Documentary Factor (2006, in cooperation with the Palais des Beaux Arts, Brussels); and Robert Adams: Turning Back, which received the 2005 Deutsche Börse Award. Formerly, Weski was chief curator at the Museum Ludwig in Cologne, where he was curator of the traveling exhibition William Eggleston: Los Alamos (2003); co-curator with Emma Dexter of Cruel and Tender: The Real in the Twentieth-Century Photograph (2003, co-organized with Tate Modern, London); and co-curator with Heinz Liesbrock of How You Look at It: Photographs of the Twentieth Century (2000).

William Eggleston, Untitled, 1975, Dye transfer print, 16 x 20", Cheim & Read, New York, © Eggleston Artistic Trust.

William Eggleston, Untitled, c.1971-73, from Troubled Waters, 1980, Dye transfer print, 16 x 20, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; museum purchase with the aid of funds from the National Endowment for the Arts, Washington, D.C., a federal agency, and the Polaroid Foundation, © Eggleston Artistic Trust.

William Eggleston, Untitled (St. Simons Island, Georgia), 1978 from Morals of Vision, 1978, Dye transfer print, 15-3/4 x 19-15/16", Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, Gift of Anne and Joel Ehrenkranz 94.113, © Eggleston Artistic Trust.

William Eggleston, Untitled, 1965-68 and 1972-74, from Los Alamos, 2003, Dye transfer print, 12 x 17-3/4", Private collection, © Eggleston Artistic Trust.

William Eggleston, Untitled, 1965-68 and 1972-74, from Los Alamos, 2003, Dye transfer print, 17-¾ x 12, Private collection, © Eggleston Artistic Trust.

William Eggleston, Morton, Mississippi, c. 1969-70, from William Eggleston’s Guide, 1976, Dye transfer print, 20-9/16 x 13-3/8", Niedersächsische Sparkassenstiftung, Hannover, © Eggleston Artistic Trust.

William Eggleston, Untitled, 1965-68 and 1972-74, from Los Alamos, 2003, Dye transfer print, 17-¾ x 12", Private collection, © Eggleston Artistic Trust.

Alexander Calder, Little Clown, the Trumpeteer, and Bearded Lady from Calder’s Circus, 1926-31, Wire, cloth, paint, yarn, thread, rhinestone buttons, electrical tape, rubber tubing, and metal horn, 12 x 3-1/2 x 3", Wire, cork, leather, paint, cardboard, and cloth, 11-1/8 x 6-1/2 x 3-1/4", Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 83.36.8a-c and 83.36.2, Photograph by Sheldan C. Collins.

Alexander Calder, Prima Donna, Woman with Bow, and Horse from Calder’s Circus, 1926-31, Wire, cloth, wood, cardboard, paint, rhinestones, and thread, 12-3/8 x 5-1/2 x 6", Metal, wire, cloth, thread, paint, cork and string, 4-7/8 x 16-1/2 x 7", Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 83.36.17, 83.36.60, and 83.36.61, Photograph by Sheldan C. Collins.

Alexander Calder, Cowboy, Cowgirl, and Horse from Calder’s Circus, 1926-31, Wire, wood, yarn, leather, cloth, metal, and string, 10-1/2 x 5-3/4 x 18-3/4", wire, cloth, leather, and cork, 6-1/4 x 7 x 6", painted wood, wire, rubber, and thread, 9 x 9-3/4 x 3-1/2", Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 83.36.20, 83.36.32, and 83.36.30, Photograph by Sheldan C. Collins.

Alexander Calder, Tight Rope Artists from Calder’s Circus, 1926-31, Wire, cloth, graphite, leather, lead, paint, and string, dimensions variable, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 83.36.48 and 83.36.50, Photograph by Sheldan C. Collins.

Alexander Calder, Dog, 1926-31, Wood, clothespin, and wire, 3-7/8 x 5-5/8 x 1-1/2", Calder Foundation, New York.

Alexander Calder, Two Spheres within a Sphere, 1931, Wire, wood, and paint, 37-1/2 x 32 x 14", Calder Foundation, New York.

Alexander Calder, Cône d'ébène, 1933, Wood, rod, wire, and paint, 106 x 55 x 24", Calder Foundation, New York.

Alexander Calder, Fanni, the Belly Dancer from Calder’s Circus, 1926-31, Wire, cloth, rhinestones, paint, thread, wood, and paper, 11-1/2 x 6 x 10-1/2", overall, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 83.36.24a-d, Photograph by Sheldan Collins.

The five suitcases in which Calder transported his Circus, 1926-1931, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. 83.36.65-69a-d, Photograph by Sheldan C. Collins.

Alexander Calder, Untitled (Figures on trapeze), 1925, Graphite on paper, 10-15/16 x 8-3/8", Calder Foundation, New York.

Alexander Calder, Half-circle, Quarter-circle, and Sphere, 1932, Metal rod, wire, and painted metal on painted wood base with motor, Overall: 76-5/8 x 35-1/2 x 25", Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchase, with funds from the Howard and Jean Lipman Foundation, Inc. 69.258, Photograph by Jerry L. Thompson.

Whitney Museum
of American Art
945 Madison Avenue
at 75th Street
800-944-8639
New York
Alexander Calder:
The Paris Years
October 16, 2008-
February 15, 2009

Alexander Calder: The Paris Years is the first comprehensive, critical look at the formative seven-year period between 1926 and 1933, when Calder, on his way to becoming one of the greatest American sculptors, discovered his own singular artistic vocabulary. A partnership between the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Centre Pompidou, Paris, this exhibition presents a fresh perspective on one of the most well-loved and critically esteemed artists of the 20th century, focusing on the period during which Calder came into his own. The exhibition, co-curated by Joan Simon, Whitney Curator-at-Large, and Brigitte Leal, Curator at the Centre Pompidou, debuts at the Whitney before traveling to Centre Pompidou (March 18-July 20, 2009).

Calder’s years in Paris (including numerous trips back and forth to the U.S.) were a time of major transformation. When he arrived in Paris in 1926, at the age of 27, he was a painter-illustrator, specializing in urban realities, not unlike his teachers at the Art Students League, where he had studied between 1923 and 1925. By the time he left Paris to return to the U.S., in 1933, he had evolved into an international figure and a defining force in 20th-century sculpture.

It was during this crucial period in his artistic development that Calder arrived at his
revolutionary notion of “drawing in space,” a concept that remained central to all of his work throughout his long career. At this time he invented a radically new kind of open-form wire portrait, at a time when sculptural portraiture was limited primarily to busts carved in stone or wood, modeled in clay, or cast in bronze. Focusing on Calder’s wire sculptures of the period, this exhibition follows from the artist’s earliest mobilizing of articulated figures for toys, to the extended cast of his animated Circus (made in Paris from 1926 to 1931), to independent figurative sculptures — including the open-form, dimensional wire portraits — and abstract motorized works, and finally to Calder’s releasing his line into buoyant, abstract, airborne gesture for his paradigm-shifting mobiles (so named by Marcel Duchamp), works that not only liberated sculpture from mass, but also incorporated movement as a “material” itself.

The exhibition includes works of art from institutions and private collections from around the world. Among the works from the Whitney and Pompidou collections, both of which are rich in Calder holdings, are the motorized Half-Circle, Quarter-Circle, and Sphere, Whitney, 1932, the stabile Object with Red Discs, Whitney, 1931, the portrait Varèse,Whitney, c. 1930, the animal sculpture Old Bull, Whitney, 1930, one of his first suspended wire figures, Josephine Baker IV, Centre Pompidou, c. 1928, and the subtly balanced Requin et Baleine, Centre Pompidou, c. 1933. These sculptures — and others less well known — are juxtaposed with an extensive presentation of drawings, many of which have not been previously exhibited, as well as films, photographs, newspaper and magazine illustrations, and correspondence. Also included are examples of Calder’s toys, some made for the artist’s own amusement, and others for commercial production, and the watercolor and gouache drawings for them that include his detailed engineering instructions for their fabrication — echoes of his training and work as a mechanical engineer prior to his art-school studies.

Calder’s skill as a reporter-illustrator was evident in his first wire portraits of notable
people who were part of the newly omnipresent celebrity culture spanning the worlds of the music hall, café society, and sports arena. The first of his wire portraits was one of Josephine Baker and the other of a boxer dressed in top hat and tails. Capturing likeness and movement, both are emblematic of the phenomenal popularity in Paris of these two recent transatlantic arrivals from New York. Alexander Calder: The Paris Years includes, as an ensemble for the first time, all four extant Josephine Baker sculptures. In his multiple views of Baker, Calder shared with many other artists he would come to know in Paris a fascination with this celebrated figure (Mondrian, who was present at her debut in La Revue nègre, in 1925, chief among them); Calder joined a roster of artists who paid homage by capturing her likeness (including Man Ray, Henri Laurens, Picasso, Van Dongen, Foujita, in the 1920s, and, in the late 1930s, Le Corbusier).

Calder would also join the many artists for whom Kiki de Montparnasse served as
celebrated model and muse, evoking her distinctive profile in wire sculptures several times. One of these (its whereabouts unknown) was made when Calder invited Kiki to pose in 1929 while he crafted a wire portrait for a film. The newly discovered silent film, Montparnasse: Where the Muses Hold Sway, a remarkable view of Paris in the 1920s, shows Calder (identified only as “the smart art world’s latest vogue — the telephone wire sculptor”) creating a portrait of Kiki and, in a previously unknown view, with one of his masterworks, Spring (Printemps), 1928, included in the exhibition. The exhibition also includes the sole extant wire portrait of Kiki by Calder, Kiki de Montparnasse II, 1930, from the collection of the Centre Pompidou. Another Kiki sculpture, Féminité / Kiki's Nose, made around 1930, its whereabouts now unknown, is seen in the exhibition via a contemporaneous image by photographer Marc Vaux, also from the collection of the Centre Pompidou. Among other celebrities and celebrated events that became subjects of Calder’s wire sculptures were Calvin Coolidge, 1927, Helen Wills, 1927, Jimmy Durante, 1928, John D. Rockefeller, c. 1927, and Lindbergh’s plane in The Arrival of the Bremen or The Spirit of St. Louis, c. 1928. Calder was at Paris’s Le Bourget airport when the record-setting transatlantic flight landed; the sculpture’s title also reflects the first East-West transatlantic flight of the Bremen in 1928.

It was during a visit to Mondrian’s studio in 1930 that Calder became riveted by the
dynamic potential of Mondrian’s cardboard rectangles affixed to the walls and, further, an idea for their oscillating movement, which he suggested to Mondrian, who declined the offer. Following this visit, Calder began to paint again, and for a few weeks following “the shock” of this visit, he created a series of geometric abstractions, immediately followed by his abstract sculptures. His movement into abstraction would mark his work for the rest of his career.

Among Calder’s first major exhibitions were those held in Paris. From 1929-1933, his works were shown in such renowned galleries as the Billiet-Worms Gallery, the Percier Gallery, the Vignon Gallery, and the Pierre Gallery. In 1931, Calder exhibited with the group Abstraction-Création, a set of like-minded artists who promoted abstract art throughout Europe. During these important years, Calder created and showed his first abstract wire sculptures, his first motorized sculptures, as well as the “stabile” abstractions, a Calder genre titled by Jean Arp. Alexander Calder: The Paris Years examines and evokes Calder’s integral position within the international art scene and his friendships and working dialogues with peers.

Calder’s Circus, one of his most famous works, a legendary ensemble in its time, and the exhibition’s conceptual and performative hub, was created over a period of five years in Paris. Numerous visits by Calder to circuses in the U.S. and in Paris were the catalyst for the artist’s first figurative wire sculptures; the aerial play of circus figures informs many of his other works. His miniature Circus was a turning point for Calder, an embrace of the most ordinary of materials — wire and string, bits of metal and cloth — and his introduction of movement itself as a “material” for making animated sculpture of many kinds. This exhibition evokes the original presentation of Calder’s Circus as a performance. The installation includes the suitcases in which the artist transported his cast of characters, sets and props; Calder carried the Circus across the ocean to New York, initially in two suitcases in 1927, and later, as the number of acts and performers increased, in five. These suitcases are in the Whitney’s collection, and in exhibiting them along with the many circus components, the realities of the Circus’s transitory and performative nature are apparent. Also on view are the phonograph records Calder played on his Victrola while giving his Circus performances, and the supplies he used when sewing the costumes. This approach addresses a critical aspect of Calder’s practice: his position as a performer and a maker of performative sculpture. Stretched out on the floor, animating the work in an early example of “performance art,” Calder was ringmaster, narrator, and puppeteer as he set into motion the many acts of his miniature Circus, including aerialists, clowns, acrobats, knife-thrower, sword-swallower, and a full complement of Roman chariots for a race finale.

In the early 1970s, Calder’s Circus was put on extended loan to the Whitney by the artist; in 1983, the Whitney purchased the work as the result of an extraordinary grassroots fundraising project by more than 500 people. It has been on nearly continuous view at the Whitney for the past 25 years and has become one of the centerpieces of the Museum’s collection. This exhibition marks the first time since it was acquired by the Whitney that the Circus will leave the Museum, when it travels to Paris, the city of its making and earliest performances.

The show includes many drawings being shown for the first time. Among them are the following:

• Circus drawings of 1925, made both at Ringling Brothers in New York and Sarasota, Florida. They include abstracted views of the wire structures supporting the circus tents and linear riggings for aerial acts, as well as intimate, realistic character studies of backstage life.

• Drawings (1925-26) sketched while observing animals at the Central Park Zoo and Bronx Zoo as he was preparing his instructional book Animal Sketching, 1926. Calder wrote the text as well as captured the movement of animals in his pen-and-ink line drawings.

• Calder’s first sketchbook, begun soon after his arrival in Paris, in 1926, inscribed with the address of the hotel in Montparnasse where he first stayed. Within are the drawings he made at the nearby Académie de la Grande Chaumière, one of the most famous art schools in Paris, where artists drew from live models.

• Drawings for toys, with detailed instructions for their fabrication, designed in Paris and commercially produced by the Gould Manufacturing Company, Oshkosh, Wisconsin.

• Notes on Calder’s Circus, 1949, is addressed to his wife and daughters and is a large, folded drawing that offers the artist's instructions for precise assembly of the
Circus.

The exhibition includes rare films of Calder at work: Sculpture Discards Clay, of 1928, and the American premiere of Le Grand Cirque Calder 1927, 1955, made by Jean Painlevé, who first saw Calder perform the Circus during his “Paris Years” and made the film some 25 years later.

Also showing for the first time in the United States is Montparnasse – Where the Muses Hold Sway, 1929, where Calder is seen as a member of the artists’ community of Montparnasse and at work in his studio, creating a wire portrait of the most famous artists’ model of the period, Kiki de Montparnasse, as discussed above.

A selection of Calder’s caricature sketches and other newspaper and magazine illustrations from The National Police Gazette, The New Yorker, The New York Times, and the Herald Tribune highlights Calder’s line and his observant eye, and includes subjects that also turn up in his paintings, such as Six Day Bike Race, 1924 and Circus Scene,1926.

An astute observer of his surroundings and a lively reporter of events, Calder wrote letters to his family from the time he was a child. A selection is included in the show, as are some of the artist’s childhood drawings, and toys he made as a youngster, precursors to those he made in the 1920s. In addition, the exhibition includes the scrapbook that Calder kept between 1926 and 1932, which includes reviews and exhibition announcements in many languages.

The catalogue, Alexander Calder: The Paris Years, 1926-1933, edited by Joan Simon and Brigitte Leal, is 304 pages with 325 images, including color plates of the works in the exhibition. In addition to essays by the exhibition’s curators, Leal and Simon, the book includes contributions from Quentin Bajac, Annie Cohen-Solal, Pepe Karmel, Eleonora Nagy with Carol Mancusi-Ungaro, Henry Petroski, and Arnauld Pierre, and a chronology by Alexander S.C. Rower. A multifaceted portrait of the artist and the period, the book offers new research and analysis of individual works and the contexts in which they were made. The essayists discuss Calder’s many innovations during The Paris Years, chief among them his abstract, motorized, and mobile works. They analyze the extended cast of Calder’s animated Circus, and include previously unpublished photographs by Brassaï and Kertész of Calder and this beloved performative sculpture. They explore the intellectual, cultural, and artistic milieu of Paris in the late 1920s and early 1930s and the contexts of Calder’s friendships with Miró, Mondrian, Duchamp, and Man Ray, among others. The catalogue, co-published by the Whitney and the Centre Pompidou, will be published in separate French and English editions, the latter distributed by Yale University Press.

Whitney Live
Objective Suspense: Colin Gee at the Calder Circus
Conceived and performed by Colin Gee (A Whitney Live Commission)
October 2008-
February 2009

In gallery-integrated performances during Museum hours, Colin Gee creates a series of intimate performance experiences, inspired by Calder's Circus. Trained at the Lecoq School in Paris and Dell’ Arte School of Physical Theatre, Gee is a former principle clown for Cirque du Soleil. With Calder's Circus in the background, Gee manipulates abstract forms in an act that focuses on the dynamics of movement, connecting with the public through eye contact, rhythm, play, and stillness.