Mary Coble will be performing “Binding Ritual, Daily Routine” at the Artists Space in New York City on November 17th at 7pm (this is a free event).

For her initial attempt at the piece, Coble gathered a few of her closest friends in her apartment and asked them to watch as she stood, fully naked, and repeatedly applied duct tape to her breasts and then tore it off, all while recording both the procedure and her audience’s reaction. By the end her breasts were red, inflamed and bleeding in places.

That experience was later played on monitors at a gallery in D.C. For her Nov. 17 New York debut, she’ll repeat the performance for an hour in front of a live audience.


From Mary Coble’s “Note to Self,” in which she tattooed the names of 100 victims of GLBT hate-crime murders on to her body with an inkless tattoo gun:


More about “Note to Self” from Grammar.police:

Coble calls attention to the meager statistical data on hate crimes. (FBI data on hate crimes only to 1996, is specified by local authorities She spent 1 year doing primary research to compile the names, a process that also uncovered two facts that informed her work: Gruesomely, many of these victims were scrawled on by their assailants, with words like “faggot” and “dyke.” The second fact: Information gathered by our government reflects none of this.