WARWICK, Steven; BROWN Jr, DeForrest (ed.)
Elevator to Mezzanine

A lookbook-like publication released in parallel to the commissionned work, Elevator to Mezzanine, presented by Steven Warwick at Secret Project Robot, NYC, in 2017.

Elevator to Mezzanine (E-M) is a cataloguing space and focus group established in 2017 by Steven Warwick & DeForrest Brown Jr. and proposes itself as a “War on Style.” E-M opens in a club environment and takes the form of a play-as-platform, a ground-level press conference, and a prepared sound design piece. The performance-as-installation features a staged version of E-M’s conceptual department store and sets out to investigate, scale and perform this flat non-space and its orbiting culture of collapsing economies and corroding identities. The work offers observations of millennial placelessness, an inescapably fearful media climate, the emotional disaffection and degradation of the pressures of wage labor, contemporary uncertainty and urban isolation. It suggests collapse in lieu of the obligation to offer answers, which in itself opens up a space where bodies are still amongst each other and together.

Published by ISSUE Project Room, 2017
Exhibition Catalogues / Performance