Emily Mast '98 to lecture on her work April 5

Artist Emily Mast will describe her performance-based work in an illustrated lecture starting at 7 p.m. Monday, April 5, in Davis Auditorium, Palamountain Hall. Admission is free and open to the public.

A 1998 Skidmore graduate who has exhibited and performed in New York and Los Angeles for the past six years, Mast will present examples of her recent work using a mix of images, sound, and video. Her talk will also feature earlier projects created during stays in Paris and Mexico.

Mast's recent performance-art works include the 2008 Looking For Something New To Long For, presented at the Roski Gallery at the University of Southern California; and Everything, Nothing, Something, Always (Walla!), at Performa 09 in New York City. Walla is described as "a performative sculpture," a gallery installation in the form of a short live theatrical play that repeats, with telling variations, over the course of three hours. Mast's newest work,It will never be known how this has to be told,opened March 20 at Steve Turner Contemporary in Los Angeles.

Born in Ohio, Mast earned a B.S. in studio art at Skidmore. She studied photography in the early 1990s at the Cleveland Institute of Art, and photography and painting in Paris in 1997. She pursued creative writing in 1996 at the New York State Summer Writers Institute, and studied both literature and creative writing in Bath, England, in 1997. In 2009, she received an M.F.A. degree from the University of Southern California, Los Angeles.

Fusing language, literature, and visual art into her performative pieces, Mast has collaborated with actors, dancers, writers, composers, choreographers, musicians, and visual artists in works she developed in New York, Los Angeles, Paris and Mexico. She has had solo shows at Steve Turner Contemporary, Samson Projects in Boston, and the Paris Project Room in Paris, France. In 2008, she curated "Egoesdayglo" at Five Thirty Three Gallery in Los Angeles. A resident artist at Skowhegan in 2006, Mast will follow her Skidmore presentation with a residency at Yaddo. As an artist, says Mast, she is"endlessly inclined to consider the nature of nothingness, doubt, and certain uncertainty."