PITTSBURGH, PA.- Mattress Factory is presenting Triple Threat by Lolo y Lauti.
Lolo y Lauti’s Triple Threat, blends place, queer history, and cultural phenomena. During the duo’s initial visit to the Mattress Factory, Lolo noted:
“[This room] has a funny shape. We spent some days wondering what the room feels like. In morphology and form, it felt like a dance studio. Our work has a lot to do with theatre as a queer safe space [when] you’re a child, in a nutshell. It felt very up our alley thematically.”
In show business, a triple threat can sing, dance, and act. It suggests excess - viewers witnessing a body asked to do more, stay visible, and continue under pressure.
Within the exhibition, a continuous mirror lines the wall of the room facing a ballet barre and three synchronized screens. Within the screens, three dancers move in silence through choreography inspired by classic Broadway and Hollywood musicals: Sweet Charity, The Pajama Game, and Promises, Promises.
The absence of sound sharpens the experience. Movement unfolds without music, emphasizing labor: rehearsal, repetition, effort. Expression and discipline blur.
Shaped by stage director/choreographers like Bob Fosse and Michael Bennett, these dances were often more than entertainment for many queer viewers. They were early sources of individual revelation. An invitation to envision their own future. Dance offered clues and codes - lessons in how to move, how to feel, how to be seen; a social choreography learned from performance.
Lolo y Lauti is a duo of contemporary Argentine artists who have been working together since 2011. Their work includes video, performance, sculpture, installations, and photography presented in formats ranging from exhibition to opera, through social networks and virtual reality. The duo claims humor as an autonomous experience and a tool to address topics such as sexuality, drugs, death and fine arts. They have shown their work in museums, galleries and festivals in Germany, Austria, Belgium, Chile, Colombia, Spain, United States, Greece, Italy, Mexico, Panama, Peru, United Kingdom and Uruguay.
Lolo y Lauti have held residencies at Villa Lena and SEA in Greece, and at ISCP in New York, among others. They recently obtained the 2022 Buenos Aires Art Week Award and the 2023 Amigos del Bellas Artes + ArtHaus Performing Arts Prize, as well as the Williams Foundation and Argentine Mozarteum Research Scholarship at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris. The artists also have a career as curators, having organized PERFUCH (Argentina’s first performance arts festival) in all its editions, as well as curating many individual and group shows in Buenos Aires.
