Performing an Actor

March 2, 2020 and onward…
Performing an Actor was canceled due to the Corona Virus Pandemic.
Watch the farewell videos by Allison and Stella.

Wild Art Group’s lead artist Allison M Keating presented Performing an Actor, the artist’s second long-form, persona-adopting performance that blurs distinctions between crafted and real identities. Creating a whole new form of “theater,” Keating will live out her parallel life as Stella de Longpre, aspiring actress with Hollywood ambitions fueled by a culture of anti-authentic crafted personalities and fame-for-fame-sake motivation, pushing the boundaries of how we present iterations of self through social media and real life scenarios.

Similar to the explorations through alter-egos in her 2016 work The Identity Project, Keating will draw upon her own ambiguity toward gender representation to probe the interplay among power, fantasy, and narcissism. As Stella, Keating will alter her appearance, create a fictional history, and live the life of an actor; attending acting class, finding an agent, auditioning, and creating online content to increase her brand awareness. As these decisions are broadcast through various media platforms over the course of a year, Performing an Actor will allow Keating’s audience to follow Stella’s narrative journey in real time.

The project was postponed a mere 3 weeks later due to the pandemic, and is now finally canceled, October 2020. Wild Art Group creates art projects relevant to our specific contemporary moment of NOW. Although exploring gender and our culture’s heteronormativity is always an important endeavor, we feel there are other more pressing issues right NOW. You know, like a pandemic and its resulting social inequities, a fascist president, and the #blacklivesmatter movement.

PART 1

Follow Stella and watch her as she leaves New York City, moves to Los Angeles,

and begins to reinvent herself to become a famous Hollywood actress.

Let me introduce you to Stella…

Stella as a character is created along the guidelines of what will make her famous; heterosexual, feminine, interested in beauty, exploiting predictable markers of femininity, appealing to the male gaze and dominant culture. Keating (who is bisexual, gender-non-conforming, and masculine in aesthetics) will explore the ways gender is portrayed through social media, how one can play up or ignore their gender through their online representation, and regularly question her sense of “self” by asking what makes her actions “real” versus “crafted.”

Stella’s journey alone is only half the content of the project. Learning from The Identity Project, the most informative aspect of a long-form live performance is the difficulty of defining where Stella stops and where Allison begins. By following @allisonmkeating as well as @stelladelongpre, the audience will see the curated cumulative documentation of the project from Keating’s perspective. She will provide additional insight into how it feels to be Stella, the hardships or joys of performing Stella for a long period of time, the social and personal impact of the project, and the inevitable toll it will take to live two lives.