NEWS RELEASE Contact: Rebecca Garrity Putnam Director of Communications (206) 432-8217 RGarrity-Putnam@fryemuseum.org                                                                                          FIRST MUSEUM EXHIBITION FOR ACCLAIMED SEATTLE PERFORMANCE GROUP Implied Violence: Yes and More and Yes and Yes and Why SEATTLE, August 10, 2010--The first art museum exhibition of the acclaimed Seattle performance group Implied Violence features sculptures, costumes, props, masks, video- and photo-documentation of selected past performances as well as a new performance created especially for the Frye Art Museum’s reflecting pools. Titled Implied Violence: Yes and More and Yes and Yes and Why, the exhibition will be on view October 9, 2010 through January 2, 2011. Co-founded by Ryan Mitchell and Mandie O’Connell, Implied Violence (IV) has produced more than twenty-six multimedia works in the past six years. The exhibition introduces IV’s key concepts and preoccupations for the first time to a broad museum audience and provides an in-depth look at the group’s exploration of altered states; elemental and highly charged materials; and the shifting status of their objects from prop to relic. Implied Violence: Yes and More and Yes and Yes and Why is intended as a primer for audiences familiar and unfamiliar with IV’s dramaturgy, working methods, and conceptual framework. It will focus on the group’s exploration of ecstatic states, produced by ether, sleep deprivation, blows to the body, extreme exertion, endurance, alcohol, or bloodletting by medicinal leeches. The exhibition will also explore the group’s use of elemental materials such as honey, felt, wax, and gold leaf, materials that have long been valued by human beings in rites and rituals. The exhibition will open with The Dorothy K: For Better, For Worse, and Forever, a new performance by Implied Violence, its first in Seattle after more than two years of national and international appearances at increasingly prestigious venues. This performance will take place in the Frye Art Museum’s reflecting pools on the first day the exhibition opens to the public, October 9, 2010, beginning at 10 am. Every hour on the hour an archer will shoot twenty homemade wooden arrows into a target, a beautifully-crafted sculpture of paraffin wax while a small group of performers execute slow silent movements in the Museum’s reflecting pools as the water rises up the legs of their costumes. Monumental kinetic sculptures, one in each of the two bays on the east wall of the reflecting pool, will be set in motion by sentinels, watching over the activities in the pool below. Over the course of the daylong performance, the archery target, freestanding in the water at the south end, will be filled with arrows, completing the artwork. When the artwork is completed it will be ceremoniously lifted from the pool and carried into the Museum where it will be placed in the exhibition. A sound score, produced live onsite, will play both outside the Museum and inside the Frye Café. The title of the exhibition at the Frye Art Museum - Yes and More and Yes and Yes and Why - is a phrase from a short story by American poet Gertrude Stein, whose writing has deep resonance for the Implied Violence. “It connotes a heady mix of human desire, avarice, pride, despair and striving”, notes Robin Held, Frye Deputy Director, Exhibitions and Collections and curator of the exhibition.  “Its verbal construction with a dense visual result, its breathless repetition-with-a-difference, its change-within-difference, is territory long occupied by IV." Implied Violence: Yes and More and Yes and Yes and Why is organized by the Frye Art Museum and curated by Robin Held in collaboration with artist Ryan Mitchell. The exhibition is funded by the Frye Foundation with the generous support of Frye Art Museum members and donors. Seasonal support is provided by ArtsFund. Implied Violence is supported by the 4Culture Site-Specific Program and the Mayor’s Office for Arts and Culture. # # # FRYE ART MUSEUM Implied Violence: Yes and More and Yes and Yes and Why The performance group Implied Violence (IV), co-founded by Ryan Mitchell and Mandie O’Connell in 2004, has produced multimedia works of increasing scale and ambition since its inception. In recognition of their accomplishments, IV was invited in 2008 to be artist-in-residence at the prestigious Watermill Center, Long Island, founded by renowned director Robert Wilson. Showcasing a shifting roster of visual artists, musicians, actors, dancers, choreographers, and sound artists, key works by Implied Violence include Die Wandlung (Center on Contemporary Art, Seattle, 2006); In Between More and More History (The Smoke Farm, 2007); Come to My Center, You Enter the Winter (The Bridge Motel, 2007); and Our Summary in Sequence: Barley Girl, Versus, and Eat Fight Fuck (801 Aloha, 2008). Implied Violence, in collaboration with Seattle-based band The Dead Science, also created The Air is Peopled with Cruel and Fearsome Birds, featured in the On the Boards Northwest New Works Festival in 2007, before traveling to venues in Los Angeles, Houston, Chicago, Detroit, New Orleans and other cities across the United States. In 2008, while artists-in-residence at the Watermill Center, the group conceptualized its largest and most elaborate work to date, a site- and time-specific performance entitled Flinch Not and Give Not Back. The following year, in summer 2009, Implied Violence was invited to present “a first look” at a component of this new work, entitled The Dorothy K, in the New Island Festival, Governor’s Island, New York City.  This presentation marked a new collaboration between Implied Violence and Parenthetical Girls, an experimental band based in Portland, Oregon, and best known for their multilayered orchestral pop songs. Following the New Island Festival, IV and Parenthetical Girls presented The Dorothy K over a three-night period at the prestigious international Austrian arts event, donaufestival 2010. This performance was produced by the Frye Art Museum, in partnership with the donaufestival, with the support of the Frye Foundation and a number of private donors. Many of the objects from the performance, IV’s most rigorous and spectacular to-date, are featured in the exhibition at the Frye Art Museum. Implied Violence: Yes and More and Yes and Yes and Why is organized by the Frye Art Museum and curated by Robin Held in collaboration with artist Ryan Mitchell. The exhibition is funded by the Frye Foundation with the generous support of Frye Art Museum members and donors. Seasonal support is provided by ArtsFund. Implied Violence is supported by the 4Culture Site-Specific Program and the Mayor’s Office for Arts and Culture.   # # # The Frye Art Museum is located at 704 Terry Avenue, Seattle, Washington, USA. Admission is free. For complete information on all exhibitions and programs, visit fryemuseum.org -30-