Put your money where your mouth is, and if approaching pain gives you a way of recovering the memory of flesh then go elsewhere.

at On Stellar Rays gallery, NY

(...)At the Lower East Side gallery On Stellar Rays, artist Georgia Sagri spent nearly a month executing her imagination of the banal rituals of an immigrant car sales person. For Sagri’s show “Put Your Money Where Your Mouth Is,..” the artist -executing the performance Do Jaguar- outlined a circle on the gallery’s floor, and during hours of operation she did laps around the demarcated space, acting according to prepared instructions, projected on the wall via a PowerPoint presentation. Sagri’s sales pitch was aggressive at times; sometimes it involved crawling into the fetal position, or growling for minutes like an aroused feline. As the performance advanced, Sagri hit her stride with certain parts and experimented with others. The script itself was absurd, filled with childlike calls and response; even so, the performance was unpredictable.

Sagri’s performance is fairly literal about the themes of exhange that the work is intended to embody. The title, “Put Your Money Where Your Mouth Is” doesn’t suggest so much the substitution of currency for communication as it does the inevitability of such a substitution. Viewers may have been invited to buy or partake in a product, but Sagri quite evidently was only selling her time in the gallery; ultimately, her antics sought to de-sublimate the uncomfortable assessment of value in a performance piece. (...)

-Georgia Sagri: A Stage of her Own, By Alex Gartenfeld, Art In America, 2009

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