Tony Feher: Free Fall
an interactive, peformative installation combining art, music, dance and language
Tony Feher is known for creating strikingly beautiful sculptures out of seemingly mundane objects. For this experiment, DiverseWorks invited the artist to consider how his sculptural work might inform, relate to, or translate into live performance – a discipline largely unexplored by Feher to date. Encompassing the main gallery space, Feher will create multiple spaces out of simple materials which will then be activated by several Houston-area composers, choreographers, and writers over the course of the exhibtion. These artists have been chosen by Feher and are creating new work in direct response to the installation and each other.
Participating collaborators and performers are Daniel Adame & Shanon Adams, Lisa E. Harris, John Pluecker & Autumn Knight, Leslie Scates (with jhon r. stronks, Spencer Gavin-Hering, Kristen Frankiewicz, and Thomas Helton), Erin Reck, Damon Smith (with David Dove, Sandy Ewen, Nick Hennies, Rebecca Novak and Chris Cogburn), Urban Souls Dance Company & Harrison Guy, Harbeer Sandhu, and music composition students from Rice University and the University of Houston (Phillip Elder, Mark Buller, Mark Hirsch, and Nigel Deane).
About the artist
Tony Feher was born in Albuquerque, New Mexico in 1956, raised in Corpus Christi, Texas and received a BA from The University of Texas in 1978. Since 1980 his work has been exhibited nationally and internationally. He has had solo presentations at Ulrich Museum of Art, Wichita State University, Kansas; Artpace, San Antonio; Arthouse at the Jones Center, Austin; Art Museum of South Texas, Corpus Christi; Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans; Worcester Art Museum, Massachusetts; Chinati Foundation, Marfa, Texas; Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York; and Addison Gallery of American Art, Phillips Academy, Andover, Massachusetts, among many other venues. Feher’s work has been included in numerous group exhibitions including Everyday Things: Contemporary Works from the Collection, Museum of Art at Rhode Island School of Design, Providence; Economy of Means: Toward Humility in Contemporary Sculpture, Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, Arizona; State of Play, Serpentine Gallery, London; Poetic Justice, 8th International Istanbul Biennial; and Me gusta el plastico, MUPO, Oaxaca, Mexico. Tony Feher, a twenty-year survey organized by Claudia Schmuckli is currently on view at the University of Houston’s Blaffer Art Museum and will travel to the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, Lincoln, MA and the Bronx Museum of the Arts, New York. Previously it was presented at the Des Moines Art Center in Iowa. He is represented in Houston by Hiram Butler Gallery.