Raegan Truax
“dirt. debris. things left behind. slow time.
As a durational performance artist workin an a variety of landscapes and urban settings, the desert provides a unique opportunity to attune our senses to rhythm and vibration while exploring frictions between labor, vitality, energy, and repose. I am drawn to the desert as a place that feels both vast and overwhelming. I also work with decay and loss, getting lost, feeling loss/lost. The desert heightens this aspect of my work in ways that leave me curious about how and where we find our anchors - how and where we establish our sense of ground.”
Raegan Truax is a durational performance artist who creates visceral live art. Her work takes breath, sweat, and skin as vital materials for performances of endurance that amplify the simultaneity of art and life. Foregrounding the body, Truax performs in consecutive durations, without taking breaks, often fasting, in silence, and without a timepiece. Each of her durational performances is a unique ephemeral action created specifically for the location.
Truax’s work has been included within The Marina Abramović Institute’s Immaterial archive and presented at Zentrum für Kunst und Urbanistik (ZK/U) in Berlin, Cité internationale des arts in Paris, SOMArts in San Francisco, grüntaler9 in Berlin, The Northern California Performance Platform, Stanford University’s Department of Art and Architecture, Berlin Art Week, Performance Studies International, and Heizraum Concert Series in Berlin. She has additionally performed at Centro Negra with AADK in Blanca Spain, Dance Theatre Workshop in New York City, the Performance Arts Institute in San Francisco, and The New Museum in New York City. Most recently, she performed Citation for 37 consecutive hours at CounterPulse in San Francisco, and choreographed Sloughing, which included 35 performers and occurred across 19 different locations in the Bay Area over 28-days.
An artist and scholar, Truax received her PhD from The Department of Theater and Performance Studies at Stanford University. Her dissertation Durational Performance: Temporalities of the Untimely Body traces the work of under-researched female artists to establish durational performance as a distinct medium of performance art. She additionally holds an MA in Humanities and Social Thought with a concentration in Gender Politics and an MA in Performance Studies from New York University. She currently teaches classes in Performance Art and Critical Theory at California College of the Arts.
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