Holiday Cruise! is an exhibition in three parts. Xavier Cha has created three personas—Horn of Plenty, Cornrow Hairbraid, and Polyhedra, to conjure a month-long Bacchanalian celebration which encompasses elements of performance, sculpture, costume design, installation, web-based meetings, and the theatrical interactivity of a happening. Each persona occupies the gallery for one week, and kicks off with Horn of Plenty, a magnificent, oversized cornucopia overflowing with exotic produce and the diminutive legs and feet of the artist. Next is Cornrow Hairbraid, a fully hirsute braided costume in which Cha embodies this creature of dance and other forms of expressive movement. Finally Polyhedra, the elegantly masked and cloaked “deity of abstraction”, stands perched atop a hemispherical pedestal painted with a golden checkerboard pattern.

The exhibition title Holiday Cruise! refers to the idea of a cruise ship vacation as well as clandestine sexual encounters. Both cruises are desperate searches for someone or something to passionately connect with, however fleeting the experience may be. This exhibition combines the internalization of fetishlike desires with the outward expression of ecstatic, communal ritual.

Since the beginning of the year www.holidaycruise2006.com has existed to showcase each of Cha’s characters as well as to function as it’s own meeting ground for potential collaborators. Essential to Holiday Cruise are the people whom the artist has found and who have found the artist. A legion of admirers, performers, artists, dancers, and musicians have signed on to pay homage to the Horn, Cornrow and Polyhedra in a series of ongoing outpourings of energy throughout the duration of the show. A ‘magical’ flautist, a mime, a whirling dervish, a modern dance instructor, a fashion pageant and many other performances and special events, both planned and spontaneous, are listed and will be updated regularly on the website.

This is New York-based artist Xavier Cha’s first solo exhibition. It will occupy the first and second floor galleries. Cha was recently awarded the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Paris residency, which she will begin this July. Her In Practice exhibition at the Sculpture Center, Cossack’s Dance, was on view January through March, 2006. Between 2004 and 2006 she orchestrated numerous performances in New York, Miami, and Los Angeles, and was included in group shows at Peres Projects in Los Angeles and Taxter & Spengemann. She received her MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2004.

Holiday Cruise! is an exhibition in three parts:

Horn of Plenty April 15th-April 25th Cornrow Hairbraid April 26th to May 4th Polyhedra May 5th to May 13th