Born
Bozoo, WV, 1986
Education
The New School (BFA)2006-2010
Sewanee (MFA) 2012-2014
-are playful by nature, and as a result, so is their artwork. The brothers Joe, Sam, and Chase Livingston make up their collective, and while their work can feel at times like a prank, they are seriously interrogating ideas of labor and building self-worth around that labor. Much of their art is performance-based and happens in 8-hour shifts. They have blown leaves around the gallery, written emails back and forth for a project that none of them were aware of, and scrolled to find the bottom of the internet as if it were the sea. Most notoriously, since 2016 they have been writing a letter every day to the Amish community of Berlin, Ohio, documenting what happened that day on the internet. The Brothers symbolize a very American aesthetic of masculinity and humor while consciously prodding its fraught roots.
-conjure simple notions of contemporary masculinity alongside complex examinations of their development within society. Their often 8-hour shift-length performances display as flipant 90’s sitcom-inspired schlock. However, under the surface bubbles a fear of the one-dimensionality of man’s usefulness, and how that fear is mostly accurate. Like with most comedy, the work reacts directly to insecurities that to an observer are already obvious and the comedian is unwilling to part with. Yet, the Brothers show an ability to comb deeper, drawing in a broad history and cultural context, causing a reexamination of America’s religious, governmental, and manufacturing mythologizing of labor as a means of self-worth.
PRACTICE 