KATE LINDHOLM received her MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she was awarded a full scholarship to the Performance Art Department. Before attending SAIC, she graduated summa cum laude with a BS in Chemistry and thinks of herself as a sort of OCD Renaissance woman. Research obsessions have included ants, enzymes, Facebook, American perfor- mance art, and the proof of zero, just to name a few. She is a practicing artist and works collaboratively with her partner to investigate questions of identity and truth within the artist-audience relationship, the body as art object, and the practice of art as an exploration and critique of everyday life.
PAUL LINDHOLM received his MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he was also awarded a full scholarship to the Performance Art Department. Before attending SAIC, he graduated summa cum laude with a BA in Philosophy and History in 2005. He works collaboratively with his partner of 12 years and has performed live at venues including the Bridge Art Fair in New York City, the University of California-Los Angeles and the Chicago Cultural Center. Their object-based art has been exhibited both nationally and internationally and they have lectured at Carnegie Mellon and Northwestern University.They have received numerous grants and awards for their work and most recently operated “Fishbowl”, an experimental performance space in downtown Chicago.
In addition to their art-making, Paul and Kate currently teach at The Kansas City Art Institute and the University of Missouri Kansas City.
They have been working collaboratively for five years and have recently begun teaching in the Art & Technology Department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. They work primarily at the interface of the body and the digital, most often in live and online performance.
From December 2005 – May 2008, they performed “being: paul and kate”, constructing themselves as a scientist and a philosopher focused on influencing personal identity through the isolation and control of fundamental daily variables. It was during this time that they began to think of their work in terms of “perpetual performance,” as we were directly engaging people in a variety of public settings including an evangelical church, a public library, a contemporary art gallery and our neighborhood streets.
From May 2008 – May 2009, they performed the New American Cowboy Project under the names Beauregard and Lily Mae Sage, a construction that assumed the outward appearance of an American icon: the cowboy. Using their bodies as catalysts, they soon found themselves regularly engaged in conversations about America: what it means to be patriotic, what the cowboy as symbol represents, what we as Americans must do to transition successfully and meaningfully into the future.
During this time, they lived illegally and without privacy in a 200 square foot space at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. They were literally performing for an audience (some aware and others unaware) at all times. This continued to push their ideas about identity, perpetual performance, and social sculpture as experimental mechanisms within their art/life. In August 2009, they entered/opened “Fishbowl”, an experimental, live/work project space located in a storefront of the Tri-Taylor neighborhood of Chicago. They are currently performing an ongoing live work entitled “Apprehending the Everyday”, where the hours of their daily activities (eating breakfast, taking a nap, etc.) are posted and each of their actions are available for public observation and consumption.
All of these projects rely on an “accidental public” in order to be realized. Their current practice investigates and relays their experiences with public/live art as it concerns issues of identity and truth within the artist-audience relationship, the body as art object, and the practice of art as an exploration and critique of everyday life. They work in a variety of media at the intersections of net.art, video, performance and painting.