Water Mill - The Watermill Center will present artist-in-residence Katharina Martin's "Forest Time" on Friday, Oct. 2, at 7 p.m. captured via video, to the general public.

Martin will film herself living in the woods around Robert Wilson's Laboratory for Performance. "Forest Time" is a public presentation where Martin will be dressed like the classic icons of glamorous femininity.

The Watermill Center is located at 39 Watermill Towd Road in Water Mill. Admission is free, however RSVP is required. For reservations contact katharinamartin.eventbrite.com

In a residency that will take place Sept. 22 through Oct. 4, the German-born, Rotterdam-based performance and video artist Martin will take advantage of the Watermill Center's unique locale, in addition to its resources for interdisciplinary work. Entitled "Forest Time," her project will entail her living, glamorously dressed throughout, in the woods surrounding the facility and filming herself over the course of several days. She will be fully attired like a Marilyn Monroe-esque female icon, with a fresh manicure, makeup, eveningwear, and high heels. She will carry out traditionally feminine activities, in addition to acts of survival and play, while living outdoors at Watermill. As she inhabits this striking incongruity dressed up in artifice in a natural environment Martin will reveal the absurdity of classic signifiers of glamorous femininity.

"Forest Time" is a natural, if more ambitious, next step, in Martin's body of work, which primarily focuses upon gender identities, whether she is filming six year-old girls boxing, or playing a business woman crumpling documents in a four-plus-hour gallery performance (as she did in Ceci n'est pas une femme). Inspired by feminist theorists such as Judith Butler and Marta Zarzycka, and admired by the likes of Marina Abramovic, Martin says, "My artistic work cannot be separated from my identity as a woman."

Martin was born in Braunschweig, Germany in 1971. At the age of six, she began competing in gymnastics and in her late 20s moved to Los Angeles and worked for several years as a stripper. Returning to Germany in 1991, she went back to school and in 1994 gave birth to a son. She worked as a professional acrobatic performance artist while studying education. In 1999, she suffered a car accident in which her son died. She continued to work in dance and acrobatics until 2001. She went back to university to study education and wrote a thesis about the outsider art of a schizophrenic. In winter 2003, she began studying art and, in summer 2006, graduated with two BFAs. In 2007 she, entered the MFA program at the Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam and now works as a performance and visual artist, with numerous performances and exhibitions to her credit. She is currently finishing a book entitled "Queendom Katharina D. Martin."

About the Watermill Center
Watermill is a laboratory for performance founded by Robert Wilson as a unique environment for young and emerging artists from around the world to explore new ideas.

For the Center's Fall and Spring Residency programs, which take place from September to June, a high-profile committee of practitioners in the arts and humanities including Wilson, Marina Abramovic, Alanna Heiss, Albert Maysles, Gerard Mortier, John Rockwell, Jonathan Safran Foer, Richard Sennett, Nike Wagner and others selects over 15 groups, individual artists and scholars in
residence to workshop their own creations. The residencies are complemented by educational programs with schools and other institutions; public events such as open rehearsals and lectures, seminars and symposia; and tours of the building and grounds.

For more information on The Watermill Center, contact Blake Zidell at Blake Zidell & Associates, 718-643-9052 or blake@blakezidell.com.