Bucket Time is a series of performances I did at the Contemporary Arts Center in New Orleans, LA as part of the group show "A Building With a View": Experiments in Anarchitecture, curated by Andrea Andersson — a series of weekly live performances during Open Call. In bucket time, I address an audience while holding a headstand, my head in a bucket, a hole revealing my mouth. In this position, the body above the bucket begins to separate from the isolated mouth that talks, sings, and recites from within the bucket. Some of the performances re-stage extant mouth-focused works (Samuel Beckett's "Not I", Vito Acconci's "Open Book", a minstrel show "stump speech" by Slim Williams); some are new. All of them are a tipping over and pouring out of ideas, experiences, feelings, and memories.
Who helped
- Emily Corazon Nelson Lawrence
- von curtis
image description
A side-by-side arrangement of three photographs of Avery Lawrence doing a handstand with his head in a white 5-gallon bucket. He is in an art gallery with white walls and a concrete floor. He wears black pants in all the photos but different button-up shirts that are green, light blue, and white. The bucket is on a two-foot high white plinth. Avery's mouth is visible through a hole in the bucket. In a small stand in front of the bucket, a microphone and blue looping pedal rest on the plinth.
image description
A side-by-side arrangement of four photographs of Avery Lawrence performing Bucket Time at the Contemporary Arts Center (CAC) in New Orleans, LA. In each photo, he does a handstand with his head in a white 5-gallon bucket. He is wearing black pants in all the photos but different button-up shirts. One is a Hawaiian shirt with palm trees and pink flamingos. The other shirts are green, light blue, and white. These images document Avery's Bucket Time performance series at the Contemporary Art Center in New Orleans in 2016.
image description
Another photograph of a Bucket Time performance at the CAC. Avery is in an art gallery with white walls and a concrete floor. He is wearing brown boots, dark green pants, and a light blue button-up shirt with the sleeves rolled. This photograph was taken from the side. Avery's legs are more splayed in this image.
image description
One more photograph of a Bucket Time performance at the CAC. Avery is wearing gray Converse high tops, black pants, and a green button-up short sleeve shirt, patterned with small dark dots. In the background of this image, figure paintings are visible in another gallery. In one painting, a woman smokes a cigarette next to a young boy.
image description
An advertising poster for Avery Lawrence's Bucket Time performance series with handwritten script in the center that reads "Bucket Time with Avery Lawrence". Central in the poster is a silhouetted, upside down human figure with its head in a white, construction bucket. Two photographs of people jumping and one photograph of the actor Bill Murray driving a truck with a groundhog surround the central figure. The background of the poster is a rectangle filled with a top-to-bottom red-to-yellow gradient.