Riting: Gabriella Rhodeen on Greg Wohead: CALL IT A DAY
I’ve never met Greg Wohead. We spoke via a pixelated skype connection for an hour or so on a Saturday morning. He was in Texas, I was in California.
It’s impossible to know someone in an hour but what struck me at the start was his curiosity. How it fills him. When he spoke, his whole body leaned forward slightly, tilted, shifted suddenly then settled again.
Our conversation moved much in the same way; shifting and slipping from one thought to another, getting lost down one to jump suddenly to a new idea then settle again.
Recently, I told him, I watched and became entranced by a docu-series about Fundamentalist Mormons living on the side of a rock face in Utah. The community, founded by a man who had been imprisoned for bigamy, works to be entirely self-sufficient; building their homes, growing their food and quietly, blissfully birthing nations to serve their Lord.
There is so much in this that feels weird to me, but as time passes the weirdness slips away and you’re just watching people – parents, spouses, friends – living life in the best way they know how. The image of sister wives embracing each other while their husband courts a potential third wife becomes less and less odd as time goes by.
We discussed Greg’s inclination toward weirdness like this – slipperiness – and how very often, as is the case in his piece CALL IT A DAY, what is unsettling, odd or perplexing doesn’t come in the shape of a climax but rather in a mundane, sneaky, incremental way.
In advance of the LAX Festival we asked Riting.org to partner with us in profiling the twelve pieces in the festival.
Greg’s performance CALL IT A DAY, runs from sunrise to sunset on October 14th, 2018, at Think Tank Gallery in the Los Angeles Exchange [LAX] Festival. Details can be found here.
Riting is an experiment in writing that engages with performance happening now in Los Angeles. Riting is a ground for encounters between artists, their critical community, and the public they belong to. Riting brings together a multiplicity of bodies and a polyphony of voices. Riting supposes there is no definitive untangling. Riting assumes mutuality of investment in the ecology of performance activity in this city.
