Electric Prop and Hum Freestyle Variations Studio is a twenty-minute performance piece by Studio Views artist-in-residence Maria Hupfield, presented in collaboration with artist Tusia Dabrowska. The multi-media performance incorporates scored and un-scored movement, sound, and vocalizations to intervene in MAD’s third-floor galleries.

The hyperactive and multicultural setting of New York City allows for multiple and simultaneous readings of the most commonplace items and contexts by individuals whose experiences are informed differently by culture, gender, race, and class. Transforming everyday materials collected from her surroundings, Hupfield creates immersive and ever-evolving atmospheres for experience. For her performance with Dabrowska, Hupfield has created a set of industrial-felt objects and other “sound-tools” to be worn, carried, and activated throughout the piece.

Electric Prop and Hum Freestyle Variations Studio is the result of Hupfield’s 2017 micro-residency at MAD as part of Studio Views, as well as her Fall 2017 BRICworkspace residency at BRIC in downtown Brooklyn. The piece will be performed again December 7–9, 2017, at Studio H at Gibney Dance as part of the program DoublePlus, curated by Emily Johnson.

Tusia Dabrowska is a time-based artist and writer whose focus is on video and live art projects. Exhibiting and publishing internationally, Dabrowska is a 2014 recipient of the Puffin Foundation Grant and an Asylum Arts alumna. She was an artist-in-residence at Signal Culture in the winter of 2017 and is currently an artist-in-residence at BRICworkspace. Dabrowska holds degrees from the New School, Trinity College Dublin, and New York University. She divides her time between Warsaw, Poland, and Brooklyn, New York. 

Multidisciplinary artist Maria Hupfield activates her creations in live performances. She is interested in the production of shared moments that open spaces for possibility and new narratives. In her work, these moments of connection are recalled and grounded by coded and recoded hand-sewn industrial felt creations. A member of the Anishinaabe Nation at Wasauksing First Nation in Ontario, Canada, Hupfield is deeply invested in intersectionality, indigenous feminisms, and explorations of race, gender, and class. Since her first residency at MAD in 2012, Hupfield has exhibited and performed her work internationally, most recently premiering her solo exhibition The One Who Keeps On Giving at the Power Plant, Toronto, in January of 2017.