MG Bernard - Visiting hours under the covers, Performed at the Emmanuel Art Gallery on April 14-16, 2025 | Photo taken by Tomas Bernal

Performance Art Week XIV

April 20-23, 2026

applications for pAW XIV are live now through april 3. to apply for PAW and PAW Xtra Large, click here.

pAW XIV Artists

chanel matsunami govreau

Separate the Spine from the Body is a performance about the private negotiations that happen inside the body, especially bodies shaped by chronic illness and gender fluidity. The performance uses soft sculpture worn over the body to create a monstrous form. Drawing from sci-fi horror and daily rituals, it confronts invisible discomfort and the urges it creates. These include the desire to dissociate, destroy, or transform the body and thetenderness required to endure one’s self. Acts of self-care and self-harm collide, blurring into one another through ritualized gestures of containment, violence, and surrender. In this performance, dismantling is essential to bodily liberation, and that harm reduction takes unexpected, personal and fantastical forms.

Chanel Matsunami Govreau will perform Separate the Spine from the Body on Monday, April 20, 2026 at the Emmanuel Art Gallery at 1:00 pm.

 

Sam grabowska

Mother Country is a new/commissioned 1-act, 3-scene, 20-minute performance that interrogates our relationship with our mothers (genetics ‘nurture’), our countries (policies and violence), and our bodies (our personal experiences and the flesh we live in). It starts as an autobiographical exploration of the artist’s Polish family and the epigenetic information passed down to them: war, occupation, mental illness as a response to trauma, and impacts on/of parenting. It then focuses on the desperate attempt at reparation and repair. And lastly connects to current American politics (terrors) while soliciting audience participation.

Sam Grabowska will perform Mother Country on Monday, April 20, 2026, at the Emmanuel Art Gallery at 3:00 pm.

 

ian hatcher

Slop Retrospective is an immersive parafictional gallery opening set in the near future, surveying the recent past. What might the art world look like if our troubled culture fully embraced generative AI aesthetics? Could "slop" become a reclaimed term of pride, even an identity? How would art taste if we all consumed it solely from a bottomless trough of pureed cultural detritus? Could we learn to like it? There are only two ways to find out: 1) wait a few years in mounting dread and suspense, or 2) come to this show. Wearing all black is recommended.

Ian Hatcher will perform Slop Retrospective on Tuesday, April 21, 2026, at the Emmanuel Art Gallery at 1:00 pm

 

Amayas Gonzales

What would it mean if I shot myself in the heart so no one did it before me? Amayas will explore that question with tender moments with themselves and the audience through dance, observation and connection.

Amayas Gonzales will perform What would it mean if I shot myself in the heart so no one did it before me? on Tuesday, April 21, 2026, at the Emmanuel Art Gallery at 6:30 pm.

 

August black

The 2011 Occupy Wall Street movement featured a beautiful protest practice called "The People's Mic," an amplification method by which one person's voice would be repeated in short iterations by a gathered crowd, sounding like a human megaphone. In this interactive and participatory performance, the artist will ask gallery-goers to come together to form a similar kind of temporary DMZ (de-structured media zone) using our voices and mobile devices, but in a looped and fragmented acoustic space of repetition and overlay.  Please come with your phones and ready to "connect".

August Black will perform All Our Voices, All Together, All at Once on Wednesday, April 22, 2026 at the Emmanuel Art Gallery at 1:00 pm

 

tanniqua-kay buchanan

Salt Archives: Sweep in Front of Your Own Porch is a ritual-based performance that gathers family memory as material, treating salt as both preservative and portal. Salt becomes a material language of protection and rupture, where when the “glass breaks”, a new beginning enters. The work considers ritual as a technology of survival and protection, where religion and spirituality coexist as tools rather than oppositions. It is a representation of the tools that Tanniqua-Kay’s family quietly whispers to her in conversation, a continued thread and representation of duality. The work considers how Black life moves in cycles of rupture, protection, volcanism, erosion, and cultivation of the land. It investigates the terror/fear and intimacy of immersion, drowning and resurfacing as embodied archives that refuse erasure. It navigates the space between religion and spirituality, honoring practices such as salting a home, grinding remedies as technologies of survival rather than superstition. The performance asks when transmission occurs and who gets to carry it forward in re-voicing ancestral memories. Ultimately, the act of sweeping becomes a gesture of accountability and care: tending one’s own “front porch” before crossing into inheritance.

Tanniqua-Kay Buchanan will perform Salt Archives: Sweep in Front of Your Own Porch on Wednesday, April 22, 2026, at the Emmanuel Art Gallery at 3:00 pm.

 

joel swanson

The Altar Call is the ritual concluding evangelical church services where congregants approach the pulpit to confess sins, accept Jesus, or rededicate their faith—all while a hymn loops continuously. During these prolonged moments of spiritual reckoning, the artist, as a child, secretly transformed hymnal pages into improvised "Plinko" boards, tracing pencil paths between the printed notes and words.

Via Negativa computationally reconstructs that childhood game as a four-channel graphic score. Four large screens, oriented vertically and arranged back-to-back to form a luminous central column, display hymn texts commonly sung during altar calls. On each screen, a dot descends through the text, colliding with and erasing words as it falls. When it reaches the bottom, it loops—just as the hymns once looped—creating a continuous, ever-diminishing score. Four professional vocalists stand facing the screens, vocally interpreting the fragmenting text in real time. As words vanish, familiar phrases become stuttered utterances, then silence. The piece cycles through four hymns with brief pauses between.

Joel Swanson will perform Via Negativa on Thursday, April 23, 2026, at the Emmanuel Art Gallery at 1:00 pm.

Past Performance Art Weeks

PAW XIII - April 14-17, 2025

PAW XII - April 22-26, 2024

PAW XI - April 18-19, 2023