Inside FEE LION's Minimalist Pop Performance Art Party

Enough with confessions and flesh, already; FEE LION shows us something that is really intimate. She stands in an artificial corner, on a white stage in a white outfit, thin bands of white climbing from her breastbone to her trachea, her face and body and instruments cut voltaic by the grid of light being projected on to them, the vaguely menacing ambience of what LION describes as “cyber depression pop” playing.

The laptop hooked up to the projector behind the artist is cracked open as the audience is coming in; the hot eye, blank in searching, spits onto the screen a jarring cobalt blue field, like a Southwest fuselage, and we can see her, as a thumbnail, as a Hotmail account, as an empty white field which fills with the redacted digits that separate FEE LION from Justina Kairytė and from us.

The mouse, with hallucinatory trailing, searches, finds a blank document page that she first scores with three dashes, / / /, before beginning to type, a stream of consciousness list whose every skeletal structure is demonstrated and witnessed live, including the decidedly pedestrian manipulation of text and font size. Kairytė composes the list until she hits an organic change, a feeling that the show is ready to shift into it's second phase—“It's never planned”—and she opens up—again, live, before anyone, with no curtain—a video of her, clicking into the bar to manually cue where she wants it to go, then launching more fully, argent Gretsch in hand, into the music.

The performance that the Chicago-based singer created to accompany her forthcoming album, Carbon Copy, strips away so much of the magic—the pre-show planning, practicing, programming—which allows artists to effortlessly present whatever image of themselves they choose to their fans. In eschewing this readymade mentality, Kairytė not only strips down her own highly cultivated image—from her boots to her eyebrows, from releasing music on tapes to music videos featuring Grotowski-influenced improvisational dance—but strikes at technology's impact on how easy it has become to surround one's self with nearly unlimited curated shades.

“It's a very raw portrayal of somebody being on the computer,” Kairytė says. “You see everything. You see me type in my password on my actual computer that I use in everyday life. And I didn't realize this until I did it for the first time: A laptop is something that is so personal, and such a secret, such a mystery, filled with personal history, filled with personal discomforts and securities, like diary entries in the word processor… it's throbbing with a lot.”

While in residency at the Chicago Performance Lab, a program run by Heidi Coleman at the University of Chicago which allows artists access to the resources of the Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts, Kairytė was part of a delegation of artists from Chicago night queen Jane Beachy's Salonathon performance series.

Availing herself of the time, space, and resources to be unfettered creatively, Kairytė was inspired in part by her fellow resident/collaborator Kendra Miller. She scrapped her original plans for music videos and instead veered into performance art pop, the manipulation of naked images as if they were another one of her instruments.

The videos, filmed with Matt Hooks in what she calls the “infinity room,” a space with a white wall, depict FEE LION warming up for the day—jumping jacks, shadow boxing—before becoming mired in her computer or phone; they show her desperately drinking a gallon of water in an attempt to feel clean, before backsliding to technology again, giving up and consuming soda and potato chips, finally being struck with vertigo from the parabolic climbs and falls and succumbing to the patterns. She refers to herself in the videos as “her.”

Kairytė had done her Carbon Copy performance just once before the Chicago Performance Lab's Salonathon Showcase, with her fellow Salonathoners at a camp in the woods of Wisconsin; the experience is still fresh, raw.

“I've been looking for this combo [of audio and visual performance] for a long time,” Kairytė says. “And now that I've found it, I think there is so much yet to be investigated and to come from that discovery.”

FEE LION's intimate manipulations at the showcase are enhanced by Miller's epic ones, which use cameras and projectors to build towering, mutating temples of imagery in conjunction with the dance-dirge, self-described “witch disco” of FEE LION's music. FEE's vocals sound rich and far away, as if lifted from an old vinyl record, mellifluous and sepia-toned; her voice spirals exhilarating upward.

The entire tableau comes close to what she calls her “minimal party” aesthetic, although Miller's mountain of optics seems to drop the space's back wall and open into a galaxy of visuals. “I've made a copy, but better,” FEE LION sings.

Learn more about FEE LION by clicking here.

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