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Miami University Center for Community Engagement Participates in Interactive Art Festival

 

 

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The Miami University Center for Community Engagement (MUCCE) in Over-the-Rhine will present Worktable by Kate McIntosh in partnership with the Contemporary Arts Center (CAC) in Cincinnati. The interactive installation is part of the CAC’s annual performance festival, This Time Tomorrow (TTT), presented from April 7 to 11, 2021. The festival commissions and presents new, cutting-edge work from international, domestic, and local artists. 

Worktable is a multi-room installation from Brussels-based artist Kate McIntosh, whose work In Many Hands made its North American premiere at the CAC in 2018. Visitors are provided with instructions, equipment, safety goggles, and materials and asked to imagine how things come apart and get reimagined; something that John Blake, the Miami University Cincinnati Professor of Community Engagement and Director of MUCCE, sees as a metaphor for neighborhood redevelopment. “While Worktable appears, at first, to be about our relationship with objects, it might also ask what it means to manipulate, alter, or destroy somebody else's place?" Worktable will be held at the Miami University Center for Community Engagement in Over-the-Rhine, a neighborhood that has seen a significant amount of redevelopment in the last decade. 

The MUCCE Storefronts Community Artists, a group with a history of community projects in Over-the-Rhine, will facilitate community conversations during the exhibition. The first Storefronts Community Artists cohort was formed in Fall 2017 to manage a new initiative, called Storefronts, with the goal of involving neighbors in events and arts-making using performance, poetry, projection, and podcast as media to explore themes of equitable development. McIntosh’s Worktable reveals the unavoidable interconnections of destruction and renewal through a microcosm of redevelopment. 

Launched in 2019, This Time Tomorrow grew out of the CAC’s ongoing performance program, which presents full seasons of cross-disciplinary, boundary-pushing performances from artists across the world. Operating behind an ethos of exploration, experimentation, and collaboration, TTT brings a wide-ranging spread of vanguard projects and experiences to local audiences, igniting dialogue and provoking exploration within the city. The inaugural edition debuted with celebrated performances by artists including Rashaad Newsome, Tania El Khoury, and Daina Ashbee.

In addition to Worktable, major projects featured in this year’s festival include Letters from Attica by Begm Erciyas, For the Love of Black Women by Alexis Cox and Spectators Festival by Raquel André. To ensure the health and safety of CAC visitors and staff, live performances during the festival will require visitors to wear masks and follow social distancing guidelines. 

 

If you go:

Worktable by Kate McIntosh

Miami University Center for Community Engagement

1300 N. Vine St., Over-the-Rhine

April 7 - 11, 2021, 3-8 p.m.

Storefronts Community Conversations: Saturday, April 10, 4 p.m., Sunday, April 11, 12 p.m.

 

The full This Time Tomorrow festival schedule and tickets are available on the Contemporary Arts Center website at http://www.contemporaryartscenter.org/this-time-tomorrow-2021.