"Is this a performance?" someone asks. A stretcher suggests otherwise as does the crowd which streamed down 18th Street on a hot Friday evening. Inside, the crowd was thick, gathered in the furtherest corner of Petzel gallery with the space's inaugural fight night featuring amateur female muay thai matches. The evening stemmed from artist Dana Hoey's current exhibition, "Dana Hoey Presents."
A fight enthusiast and an amateur practitioner, Hoey bears down on the choreography of movement and how it can be captured in a static image. This materializes as a series of portraits shot mostly in the artist's studio with hanging metal sculptures (which now occupy Petzel's windows). These floating bodies and their flashing panels echoed the evening's cadence with its acts of flurried limbs and cheers syncopated by moments of quivering stillness. Here the evening's festivities captured by Hoey and her team.
