Allison Brainard, Fact

I didn’t read any books last year. Well, that isn’t really true, but I think you know what I mean: I bought a few books, and others would lend them to me, or make a recommendation, or even buy one for me…though when the time came to open one of these books, my eyes would usually just gloss over the pages without being able to hold onto anything.

Yet I still had that impulse to absorb information and to respond to my limited surroundings and experiences by researching them, which then expanded them, or caused me to engage more deeply with them, or allowed me to escape them altogether.

What I have left from this process is a long list of information (all completely true) about the world and about myself.
I look forward to sharing some of these facts with you.

-Allison Brainard

Fact is a performance by artist Allison Brainard that combines oration, comedic improvisation, drawing, and musical theater with the structures and aesthetics of a PowerPoint presentation. A site-responsive and spatially immersive piece, the process for conceiving this work began when 3307 W Washington Blvd director Amanda Martin Katz invited Brainard to “do something” for the space’s finale series and shared with her the new interior additions to the location. Katz had built a lofted bed when the BOOKSHELVES residency program closed, as the space primarily would serve as her studio going forward, and moved in a piano and an eight-foot-tall mirror. Since every design element of 3307 had been used in performances and/or installations over the years, Katz asked that Brainard’s activation respond to these additions in the same spirit. Moving from the bed, to the mirror, to the bookshelves, and, finally, to the piano, Brainard’s work links each domestic area with a recounting of facts she learned while in quarantine in her Brooklyn apartment, exploring how the brevity of trivial research allowed her to satisfy her innate curiosity about the world in a time of intellectual and emotional fragmentation. Brainard was the first artist to activate 3307, through a performance at the inaugural dinner in 2016, so it was fitting that this series began with her.

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As this was the first time many were gathering in art spaces since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, the evening featured a cocktail hour (which would become part of each subsequent EXPERIMENTATIONS program) and was held in compliance with safety protocols at the time.