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

On Thursday, October 22 at 7:30pm, Smack Mellon in Brooklyn hosts Asia Stewart's performance "any experience with men and alcohol," running about 60 minutes. It accompanies the gallery's current exhibition, "How We Work: Smack Mellon at 30," in which Stewart is an exhibiting artist, and presents a new iteration of her ongoing participatory work.

Stewart performs as an object of service, drawing on the image of designer Allen Jones's controversial "Women as Furniture" series. Treating the table, and herself, as a site of exchange, she leads audience members through a series of challenges about power, service and control.

Born in 1996, Stewart is a visual artist who uses performance as a path to image-making. Her work is often durational and built on endurance, unfolding as social experiments that negotiate agency and power with the audience. She introduces risk into the performer-audience relationship, and exchanges can be physical, material, monetary, energetic or intangible. Her projects have been supported by organizations including The Shed, Franklin Furnace, A.I.R. Gallery and the Brooklyn Arts Council, and her first series of prints is in the permanent collection of the Mint Museum in Charlotte.

The event takes place at 92 Plymouth St. Registration is through Eventbrite. The gallery is open Wednesday through Sunday, noon to 6pm, with free admission.