The Tea Party:a performance by the outskirts artist collective: Camille Metcalfe and Jaime Drew
the outskirts are interested in creating public art to alter the urban landscape by challenging the binary conceptions of public vs. private. We aim to re-insert the voice of the artist and of the community within public space. While always keeping an eye on aesthetics we aim to incite a dialogue that encourages reflection on contemporary social and political issues.
The Tea Party is a collaborative performance that seeks to open a space for dialogue between the public and the private sphere by aesthetically positioning the private within the public. This staged juxtaposition, in the form of a high tea party held in public space, ruptures the viewer’s notions of the public and the private, creating an interstice in which ideas of race, class and gender are redefined. The use of the colonial tradition of high tea as a marker of class privilege and excess in the context of a deeply stratified social hierarchy seeks to generate a parodic and unsettling commentary on contemporary social issues.
