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Blow-Out Odyssey:
On Tuesday, August 10th, at 1:00pm, Sean Fletcher and Isabel Reichert performed “Blow-Out Odyssey”. For this public intervention, the artists invited themselves — and their personal arguments with each other — into the offices of several downtown businesses. While winding their way through the financial district, Fletcher and Reichert walked and argued, loudly and passionately, about their finances, their unintended moments of dishonesty, their expectations about the other’s role in the relationship, and their general frustrations with each other as a couple.
All the businesses chosen as stops along their voyage are dependent on oil for a significant portion of their revenue. While the artists visited with the local Chevron affiliate and with Bechtel Corporation, most of their stops were less obvious types of commerce. An interactive map, built to track their quarrelling journey through the financial district, shows the location of a software design firm that has developed programs to help oil companies track damage to their trans-national pipelines, an insurance firm that administers casualty claims for oil companies, an investment firm that diversifies clients’ investments into oil and energy stocks, and a law firm that drafts contracts for oil companies. The artists even visited a company that uses solar technology to improve the effectiveness of drill rig platforms.
“Since 1994, we have collaborated together on conceptually based performance works, interventions, writings, installations, videos, photography and prints. In a nutshell, our work is about power and vulnerability; how it relates to relationship dynamics, society, and politics. For us, collaborating is a means of integrating the negotiation for power into the work of art.
As artists who spent much of our education studying the history of fluxist and conceptual art, we prefer to start with a thought, a discussion, or perhaps a feeling. The medium we choose to display the art is always secondary to the conversation that starts the piece.
We exhibit internationally, and we have appeared on both NPR member stations KQED and KALW in San Francisco, on Studio 360 (a PRI syndicated program) in New York, and Spiegel On-Line in Europe. Our work has appeared in numerous art publications and the major media including Flash Art International, Art Week, East Bay Express, Der Spiegel, the Associated Press, The Contra Costa Times, The Oakland Tribune, The San Francisco Chronicle, and The Washington Post. We have lectured at numerous universities and colleges as well as museums about our work. Outside the studio, Isabel Reichert teaches university courses in conceptual art, film, and digital media. Sean Fletcher works professionally as a financial planner in San Francisco, CA.”