Wynne Greenwood and Colin Self In Conversation
To mark the occasion of our 50th anniversary in 2021, The Kitchen continued a series of conversations among artists across generations who will discuss their work and their perspectives on the organization’s evolving role in the cultural landscape. These programs create opportunities to draw out connections within The Kitchen’s community and to reflect on the organization’s history through the lens of first-hand accounts. The recording of this conversation between Wynne Greenwood and Colin Self, which took place via livestream on June 10, 2021, appears below.
This conversation coincides with a Video Viewing Room on The Kitchen OnScreen from June 7–21 highlighting Greenwood’s Tracy + the Plastics project on the occasion of the reissue of their entire discography this month on the label Cruisin.
Tracy + the Plastics first performed at The Kitchen in 2004 as part of the 2004 Whitney Biennial and returned the following year to present the specially commissioned installation and performance entitled ROOM, created in collaboration with sculptor Fawn Krieger. Self appeared at The Kitchen in 2014 as part of Karlheinz Stockhausen’s “Originale”. They returned in 2017 to present The Fool, a chamber opera by Self and Raúl de Nieves that created an allegorical journey exploring time, beauty, communion, and mortality through the story of the archetypal trickster, a character whose disruption of convention serves to educate, liberate, and construct positive social change.
This event is the sixth in the series of 50th Anniversary Conversations. Previous events in the series included conversations with Dara Birnbaum and Sondra Perry, Moor Mother and Vernon Reid, Eric Bogosian and Tina Satter, Carlota Schoolman and Stephen Vitiello, and a group discussion “Literature at The Kitchen: A Roundtable with Constance DeJong, Jessica Hagedorn, Carl Hancock Rux, and Matvei Yankelevich.”
Wynne Greenwood is a video artist and song-maker who also often brings those things together with objects, installation, and performance. Her practice grows from making dialogues with versions of self and the worlds those versions live in/are of. From 1999–2006, Greenwood created and performed the multimedia art-band Tracy + the Plastics, blurring distinctions between the contemporary art and music worlds, and crossing venues and contexts from house shows to art institutions. Upon ending the project, Greenwood shifted her focus to installation and object-based work. She has recently returned to making music and videos with soundtracks. Her work has been included in exhibitions at a variety of spaces including the New Museum; the Cooley Gallery, Reed College, Portland; Fanta Spazio, Milan; Crush Repeat, Seattle; the 2004 Whitney Biennial; The Kitchen; Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects; the Henry Art Gallery, University of Washington, Seattle; and Soloway, Brooklyn. Her work is represented by Fourteen30 Contemporary, Portland, OR.
Colin Self is an artist, composer, and choreographer based in New York and Berlin. They create music and performances designed to trouble binaries and play with the boundaries of perception. Self works with a broad range of communities using voices, bodies, and computers as tools to interface with biological and technological software. Self is a teacher at NYU’s Clive Davis Institute in Berlin and has presented work at The Dutch National Opera, HAU Berlin, the New Museum, The Kitchen, and Issue Project Room, among many international festivals and venues. They are a Rhizome Commission Grant recipient and a Queer Art Mentorship Fellow. They served as an Eyebeam Resident in 2016 and a resident fellow at Etopia for FUGA in Zaragoza, Spain in 2018. They are a co-founder of the NYC queer performance collective Chez Deep and The Radical Diva Grant. Self received their MFA in music and sound from Bard. Self also works closely with Holly Herndon and has performed with her touring ensemble since 2015. They run XOIR, an international non-utilitarian vocal workshop focused on alternative modalities of group singing, and releases solo music on the record label RVNG Intl.
Images: Left) Wynne Greenwood. Photo by Jenny Riffle. Courtesy of the artist. Right) Colin Self. Photo by Milena Kirche. Courtesy of the artist.