Tired of the election season? Got a bad case of campaign fatigue? The Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) has a solution with Hilary Meehan’s Running for Her Life Campaign Kick-Off Performance Speech on Jacome Plaza, downtown Saturday, Oct. 11, at 11 a.m.

If you’re heading downtown for Tucson Meet Yourself (and you should be–I recommend the sweet potato pie from the bBptist church booth), give this Hilary a try. I wanted to find out how I can be one of her embed supporters. That would be cool.

From the MOCA press release this week:

“Campaign fatigue” got you down? Feeling alienated from the political process? Come to the launch of Meehan’s Running for Her Life campaign, a site-specific performative and interactive project that is equal parts political satire and self-help manual. Meehan will be launching her Tucson campaign with a free public performance speech on Jacome Plaza (on Stone Ave., between Alameda and Pennington) on Saturday, October 11, at 11am – just in time for the annual Tucson Meet Yourself Festival and November’s elections.

Taking cues simultaneously from the self-help industry and the landscape of the contemporary political campaign industry, Meehan’s campaign is as much a manifesto about living one’s own life – rather than one dictated by “the powers that be – as a critique of the shallow spin cycle that is our contemporary electoral process. Meehan’s project loosely chronicles her own life, examining her choice to commit to a life of art in a culture that doesn’t legitimize that path, preferring instead the metrics of free-market capitalism and the validating categories of census bureau demographics. Meehan’s public performance takes the guise of a campaign launch in a public plaza complete with stump speech, political posters, and “embedded” supporters.

About Hilary Meehan:

Meehan is a visual and conceptual artist working across the disciplines of performance and design. A recent participant in MOCA’s Artist-in-Residence program, she holds an MFA in Print Media from the Cranbrook Academy of Art and a BED in Architecture from Miami University.

www.moca-tucson.org

This article appears in Oct 9-15, 2008.