De-Installation Series

Championdance (Felicia Ballos and Flora Wiegmann)

Flora Wiegmann and Felicia Ballos formed a collaboration called ChampionDance in 2003. Under the roof of Champion Fine Art, they embarked on a series of dance performances called The De-installation Series. This project consisted of nine monthly shows, each performed in the gallery space just after an exhibition was de-installed. The development and structure of each performance evolved directly out of a shared space with each exhibition. After a few weeks of rehearsals, they produced a single-night event that was the culmination of their relationship with the given show; the spatial placement of the dancers and the audience members reflected the recent group of artworks, just as traces of those artworks appeared within the movement of the dance. Each performance was accompanied by live music, with the exception of “For Your Pocket” for which the sound score was created by a collection of nine transistor radios that were gradually tuned to a common station.
Although the habit was to remove everything from the gallery immediately before the performance, in a few instances, the decision was made to keep certain works in the space and incorporate them into the piece, providing imagery, lighting, or sound. These important additions included Sylvie Fleury’s neon sign that read “Pleasures”, Alex Kwartler’s wall painting of fireworks (recently sanded and awaiting its disappearance under a fresh coat of white paint), Amy Granat’s scratch films, and a computer-generated oceanic projection created by Dan Torop.

Since then,
Ballos / Wiegmann has continued to make works for specifically for spaces like Le102 in Grenoble, France (images below), a beach in Miami for Frisbee (ArtBasel), and The Kitchen, Rental Gallery, Elizabeth Dee Gallery, and Nicole Klagsbrun in New York City.