East City Art – Performance Artist Mary Coble

In this East City Art post Anna Flaaten describes the unique and meaningful work of performance artist Mary Coble. Coble’s next showing will take place at Conner Contemporary Art in Northeast DC from May 15th-July 3rd.

“Inspired by her lakeside artist residency in Skowhegan, Maine last summer where she spent time exploring new subject matter and an intuitive work process, Mary Coble’s new works at Conner Contemporay focus on themes of purification and renewal in actions focused on the element of water. To gather her material, the artist went door-to-door, collecting water samples from residences in all of DC’s 8 wards. Coble crossed demographic boundaries to emphasize that water quality has differential effects across populations. Her work will include a live endurance performance this Saturday, May 15th and three new videos.

In her performance, she seeks to raise social awareness about water quality and availability in the local and global communities and to call attention to the internal effects of water quality. Her videos aim to invite her audience to open up a dialogue of how the political is personal and to consider access to clean water a fundamental human right.”

To read the complete post, and for more details on the show’s opening, click here. To learn more about the Conner Contemporary Art gallery, visit its site here.

Image in the post is of Coble’s ‘Blood Script’.