The Body Being

The Oak Cliff Cultural Center is pleased to present The Body Being, featuring the work of Dallas-based artists Taylor Cleveland, Erica Felicella, and Danielle Georgiou. The exhibition runs December 3, 2022 – January 7, 2023 at the Oak Cliff Cultural Center and opens with a reception for the artists on Saturday, December 3, from 6:00 – 8:00 pm.

Artist Erica Felicella will perform her durational work, Come Back from Goodbye during the reception.

Our bodies are policed by society and government alike. Battered by time and individual experience and co-opted into digital spaces as marketing tools for things we do not need. And yet, they are a miraculous phenomenon. And the act of living in them, though individual, is also interwoven. Curated by Iris Bechtol, The Body Being stems from an interest in the body as central to our human experience, which is rooted in a connection to others and the surrounding world. Twentieth-century French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty went mainly against the grain of his peers and emphasized the body, not the mind, as primary to our perception of the world. He says, “We know not through our intellect but through our experience.” How are these experiences central to our understanding of others? By weaving together the ideas of these three artists concerned with bodily experiences in a singular space, the exhibition encourages a re-looking at the “lived experience.” With the body at the core of how we understand being in the world.

Each artist in The Body Being explores the body across various lived experiences. Concerned with the experience and transformation of the body through our contact with technology, Cleveland uses video, animation, and installation to consider the boundaries between human and tech. His installations explore the uncanny relationship between the two and inquires how our attachment and reliance to tech may alter our physical selves. Georgiou mines the body and its memory to explore the changing perceptions of one’s body in relation to internal and external forces. Her performances mediated through video screens expose vulnerability through a voyeuristic and often darkly comic lens. Felicella welcomes her audience to “a place of healing and release” as she explores the profound experiences of loss through a durational performance. Developed from personal narratives, her practice seeks to create a connection to the collective experience of “human emotion and reaction”.

Erica Felicella is a practicing artist and arts professional that moved to Dallas over 20 years ago and lives in Oak Cliff. Her greatest passions are the arts, culture, and the community of North Texas. She works as an artist, curator, producer, organizer, and program developer. Her years of advocacy in Dallas have allowed her to form a deep bond in the North Texas arts sphere. Her current artistic practice includes endurance and durational based performance, site specific installation, and new media works. Her works dive into the depths of society through exploration of thoughts, ideas and a felt response of a collective whole. Felicella is currently the Executive Producer of Dallas based arts organization AURORA. She works alongside the founders to be a part of its growth and expansion.

Taylor Cleveland is an artist and creative director from and based in Dallas, Texas. He received his BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2016 with an emphasis in Film, Video, New Media, and Animation. His work has been exhibited internationally in many capacities including residencies, collaborations with brands, studios, & artists, and group exhibitions. Taylor's work is focused on technology's role in people's environments [physical and/or digital]. He explores this focus through mediums including but not limited to performance, video, projection, audio, music, animation, installation, code, and paint. Provocatively playful, his work immerses audiences within spectacles that seek to reconfigure material senses at physical, cultural, and individual levels

Danielle Georgiou is a multi-hyphenate artist and educator who works in dance, theatre, and performance and video art. Her stage and video work deal with puzzles found in femininity—vulnerability, deformity, and beauty. Her work has shown nationally across Texas, New York (Horton Gallery), California (Rogue Fringe Festival), Florida (Bosch Film Festival), Oregon (Portland’s Experimental Film Festival), and internationally in Germany (2nd Berlin Becher Triennial) and Scotland (Edinburg Arts Festival). In 2013, her dance theatre work, Pizzicato Porno, was selected for exhibition at the 2013 Texas Biennial. In 2014, Women and Their Work (Austin, TX) chose her for a solo show. The work in that show explored the effect of social media on beauty standards. In 2011, Georgiou created the Danielle Georgiou Dance Group (DGDG). Under DGDG, she has created a series of collaborative, devised dance theatre productions with a team of artists and dancers based in Dallas, TX. DGDG has performed across Texas, Oklahoma, and California. She received her Ph.D. in Humanities-Aesthetic Studies in 2018 from the University of Texas at Dallas. Her dissertation focused on redefining contemporary dance theatre and exploring the interdisciplinary nature of dance and avant-garde, experimental theatre practices.

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