About the Artist
Call Your Mom (Emma Bergman, E Cadoux, Sophie Goldberg, and Mia Massimino) is a multimedia performance collective founded in 2014 and based in Baltimore, MD. Known for interdisciplinary, immersive works, Call Your Mom uses video, installation, movement, and participatory performance to facilitate spaces of reflective vulnerability. The collective engages the public in conversational work that responds to local perspectives. Call Your Mom’s making structure is horizontal; all four voices hold equal weight in the process. Our creative process begins when we select a theme. We develop the work by exploring that theme in multiple mediums, never limiting ourselves to a single form. Past work has engaged with women’s individual and collective narratives, mother figures, miscommunication, familial structures, and ritual/celebration. With our current work, Say You’re Sorry (2019-2020), Call Your Mom posits that true forgiveness is a rarity and seeks to understand how and why individuals and cultures forgiveArtist's Statement
Call Your Mom create interactive theatre works that encourage spaces of reflective vulnerability. Inspired by performance processes like Augusto Boal's Theatre of the Oppressed and the Neo-Futurists' episodic form, the applicants challenge themselves to communicate around intimacy, embodiment, and injustice in multiple modalities. Their creative process begins when they select a theme and explore that theme in multiple mediums. Over the course of the applicants' five year collaboration, their work has evolved to include installation, video work, sound art, dance, and music composition. The applicant's current project, Say You're Sorry, seeks to understand how and why individuals and cultures forgiveFeatured Work
Photos
Featured Work: Photos
Too Day II
2018
Over the course of 3 hours, the applicants welcomed groups of 4 randomly selected participants to join in the rituals of Too Day, the only holiday celebrated solely amongst strangers. In the image, Too Day participants look at their New Best Stranger through installed window panes. This performance premiered at the 23rd Annual Cucalorus Festival in Wilmington, NC, and was performed at the 2018 Janet and Walter Sondheim Semifinalist Exhibition at the Maryland Institute College of Art.
Truce
2019
The applicant's “Truce,” part of a larger body of work called Say You're Sorry, is a screendance and installation, shown at the Janet and Walter Sondheim Semifinalist Exhibition in July 2019. The work is a two channel video piece, in which audiences can don a set of headphones and dive into one side of a truce. The other video, and other set of headphones, illustrates the interiority of the other party. The piece viscerally illustrates not being able to see eye to eye, and calling it a draw.
Household Nest
2017
Household was a travelling show exhibited in both a house and gallery in Ann Arbor, Michigan. The work employed live art, video, audio, and sculpture to question structures of home and family. The applicants “played house,” creating works that revealed flaws in mythologies of home. Composition and installation audio engineering by Douglas Hertz, live french horn by Spencer Schaefer. The image provided shows Nest, an interactive installation that shields the participant. When entered, a lullaby composed and sung by the applicants plays.
Too Day
2018
Over the course of 3 hours, the applicants welcomed groups of 4 randomly selected participants to join in the rituals of Too Day, the only holiday celebrated solely amongst strangers. In the image, the applicants introduce their participants to their New Best Stranger, a fellow participant who will interact with them through a pane of glass. This performance premiered at the 23rd Annual Cucalorus Festival in Wilmington, NC, and was performed at the 2018 Janet and Walter Sondheim Semifinalist Exhibition at the Maryland Institute College of Art.
Hard Feelings: Install Shot II
2019
"Hard Feelings: A Show About Grudges" is a humorous exploration of what it means to make, hold, share, and shed a grudge. In the image, the applicants hold the "grudge," which is filled with ingredients offered up by the audience, such as spite, time, and tenacity. "Hard Feelings" is part of a larger body of work called "Say You're Sorry.
Hard Feelings
2019
"Hard Feelings: A Show About Grudges" is a humorous exploration of what it means to make, hold, share, and shed a grudge. In the image, the applicants hold the "grudge," which is filled with ingredients offered up by the audience, such as spite, time, and tenacity. "Hard Feelings" is part of a larger body of work called "Say You're Sorry.