A four hour durational performance

Five performers in grey corporate attire sit together at a shared table. Rather than discuss work, they draw, carve, mold clay and paint, each noticing the room, the guests moving through it, an apple, a sandwich, black coffee in a white porcelain mug. The performers never address the spectators. Absorbed in looking and making, they hold open a space in which time is not owed to anyone.

Long Lunch takes its starting point from Michael Ende's novel Momo (1973), in which the Grey Gentlemen (die grauen Herren) run a Timesavings Bank and persuade a city that any hour not spent productively is an hour wasted. Artist Jessie Holmes interprets the Grey Gentlemen as both the system and the self: a logic imposed from outside that has come to sound like our own thinking. Their counterpart is Momo, a child who listens so closely that others recover their own voices and begin to hear their individual thoughts again.

The performers occupy both positions at once. Their grey corporate dress cites the Grey Gentlemen, while their sustained looking and making enact Momo's attentiveness. The performers propose a different rhythm, slower, more particular. Some set their jackets over the backs of their chairs, across their laps or around their shoulders, and individual marks begin to interrupt the grey.

Long Lunch proposes art as a form of sustenance that exceeds financial gain. It considers how time is distributed between doing for others and doing for oneself and at what cost or exchange. The durational performance sits within the circulation of a group show, opening a pocket of stillness: seated, absorbed, attentive to the self and to the room. Each hour, in Ende's book, is a flower, and no two are alike. The work asks what an hour is for, beyond wins and gains. Here, the hours are not saved but lived. Creativity is not another expense or pastime to escape from life, but a speculative practice for inhabiting it.

About the Artist
Jessie Holmes (b. 1982, Canada) is an interdisciplinary artist based in Vancouver, Canada, working across performance, writing and painting, Her parafictional practice stages fiction within lived reality building characters and narratives from the protocols of western daily life. She studied at Emily Carr University of Art and Design (BFA), Vancouver; the Städelschule, Frankfurt am Main; and OCAD University (MFA), Toronto, and worked as the assistant to Douglas Gordon from 2009 to 2018, Berlin. Her work has been presented at Basel Social Club during Art Basel, Berlin Gallery Week with The Performance Agency, and Docent Art during Paris+, among others.
jessieholmes.ca | hoteladipose.com IG: @jessssieholmes @hoteladipose


A massive thank you to the performers: May Su, Katie van der Giessen, Carla Miranda, Matthew Robertson, Richard Quay and the Concrete & Canvas team.