At Brooklyn's Smack Mellon in DUMBO, Asia Stewart Becomes a Table for 'any experience with men and alcohol'

Smack Mellon, the gallery on Plymouth Street in DUMBO, hosts Asia Stewart's performance "any experience with men and alcohol" on Thursday, October 22 at 7:30pm. The run time is about 60 minutes. It is staged in conjunction with the gallery's current show, "How We Work: Smack Mellon at 30," in which Stewart is an exhibiting artist, and it is a new iteration of a participatory piece she has been making over time.

Stewart performs as an object of service, appropriating the image of designer Allen Jones's controversial "Women as Furniture" series. She treats the table, and herself, as a site of exchange and leads audience members through a series of challenges related to power, service and control. The photograph on the gallery's page shows the setup in an earlier staging: a clear tabletop crowded with glasses, with a performer's hands and feet showing around them.

Born in 1996, Stewart is a visual artist who uses performance as a pathway to image-making. Her performances are often durational works of endurance that play out as social experiments, negotiating terms of agency and power with the audience. She introduces levels of risk into the performer-audience relationship and seeks attention, engagement and unease from viewers. Exchanges are almost always unpredictable, whether physical, material, monetary, energetic or intangible. Afterward she makes autonomous works, including photographs, prints, sculptures and installations, that carry the essence of the live act.

Her performances have been supported by The Shed, Franklin Furnace, A.I.R. Gallery, The Watermill Center, GALLIM and the Brooklyn Arts Council, among others. Her work has been shown at The Bronx Museum, NARS Foundation and Anthology Film Archives, and her first series of prints belongs to the permanent collection of the Mint Museum in Charlotte, North Carolina.

Registration was through Eventbrite, and the gallery's Instagram said on the day that tonight's performance had sold out. The gallery at 92 Plymouth St. is open Wednesday through Sunday, noon to 6pm, with free admission. Another program tied to the same exhibition follows on Thursday, October 29 at 6:30pm: "Interpreting the Designated Mourner," a participatory reading of Avram Finkelstein's adaptation of Wallace Shawn's play.