From the original Festival website:

Homage is a homage to:

• all fedora hats, including my own
• my hat maker in the East End of London whom I have been visiting for twenty five years
• my step-grandfather, who stepped out of his First World War helmet into his Fedora
• Rembrandt and his hat in his self-portraits, which I visit as often as I can in North London
• Beuys, whose hat met mine on a number of occasions
• existing, ‘somewhere between the moving and the static’
• in this context this performance is a Homage to friend, former manager and part founder of the NRLA – Steve Rogers

Marty St James will present his rendition of Homage performance video vocal sculpture in time and space…a sense and senseless exploration into language, meaninglessness and the meaningful.

Homage is a video portrait and live performance taking its cues from ‘other’ less popular, often forgotten cultural communities. Based on the notion of connectivity, it is a transmission from one time and space to another with no limitations. The work uses the simple object of a hat to engage the person, the hat representing community. It attempts to address the viewer in a direct but purposeful manner, locating values of being via image, movement and sound, reaching for a sense of consciousness.

People have a high intelligence that is often discredited by systems, institutions and mainstream politics – creativity can release this via technology, tapping into individuality within a sense of place and global community. ‘Communitas’ means ‘the same’ but at the centre of the same must exist the individual. In a world where global connection can potentially come to demonstrate a sense of ‘flesh isolation’ Homage relates to a sense of personal history (Grandfather), creativity (Beuys) and community in place and time.

St James’s last public performance art work was the Civic Monument, an Artangel/ Gulbenkian touring project in 1990. Last year he presented Homage, a 7-minute performance, his first public work for some 18 years at his solo exhibition The Invisible Man – a video triptych installation in New York City.

Marty St James has worked primarily as a performance artist using video, photography, installation and drawing. His work locates itself between the moving and the static. St James has exhibited in leading museums in London, New York, Moscow, Paris, Buenos Aires and Tokyo. The Video Portraits are some of his best-known works including The Swimmer, an 11-monitor installation in the collection of the National Portrait Gallery, London. These works range from miniature single monitor video objects to large multi-monitor installations. Other works have included Picture Yourself, a year- long inter-active digital installation at the Scottish National Galleries; Boy /Girl, video diptych in Portrait Masterpieces of the Twentieth Century with Picasso, Warhol, Bacon. etc. (NPG London) (both 2000); The Invisible Man(2007) an ‘upside down road movie video triptych’, the Chelsea Art Museum, New York. 40 of his videos form part of the National Film and Television Archive at the British Film Institute.

Marty was Artist-in-Residence in Antarctica in 2010 and 2014.

martystjames.com