Terry Fox has been played on NTS shows including Erased Tapes, with The Labyrinth Scored For The Purrs Of 11 Different Cats first played on 20 January 2020.

Terry Fox (born in Seattle, Washington 1943; died 2008 in Cologne, Germany) was an American video, conceptual, and performance artist. Fox was originally based in San Francisco, and later moved to Liege, Belgium. Fox was an important figure in post-minimal sculpture, performance, and video art. His most important works explored a sculptural experience with sound, and did a very important series of works de-coding the Chartres Labyrinth. He had two major exhibitions in Berkeley, one curated by Brenda Richardson in 1973, and one in 1985 organized around the body of works owned by the Berkeley Art Museum organized by Connie Lewallen.

Represented by the San Francisco dealer Paule Anglim, he also exhibited periodically at Ronald Feldman Fine Arts in New York City.

Terry Fox was born in 1943 in Seattle. At the age of seventeen, he was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s disease, a cancer of the lymphatic system. As Brenda Richardson wrote in the 1973 catalog for his solo exhibition at the University of California Berkeley Art Museum, “Fox’s installations and performances describe, sometimes quite literally, the physical and emotional circumstances of illness, hospitalization, isolation, and the physiology of being alive, death, and spiritual transfiguration.” As a young artist, Fox was drawn to the ephemeral nature of performance, he said, because “the only people this art exists for are the people who are there, and that’s the only time the art exists.”

After graduating from high school, Fox lived for several months in Italy, briefly attending the Accademia di Belle Arti, Rome, then moved to San Francisco. Three years later, he spent a year in Paris, then returned to San Francisco to live for a decade before moving permanently to Europe. He now lives in Cologne, Germany. Fox began to establish a reputation as a performance artist in 1970 with a solo show at the Richmond Art Center, California, called “Levitation Piece”, in which he lay on a mound of earth in the gallery and attempted through concentration to levitate his body. He was included in an important group show, “Prospect 71”, at the Kunsthalle, Düsseldorf, in 1971, and in Documenta V in Kassel, Germany, in 1972.

In 1972 Fox made a visit to the labyrinth at Chartres Cathedral and wrote that “although it exists physically, on the floor of the cathedral, it is not really an object at all; it is a metaphor.” For several subsequent years, Fox set about expanding that metaphor in performance work, sound works, and video. Constance Lewallen described one of his sound pieces, The Labyrinth Scored for the Purrs of 11 Different Cats, in a 2003 catalog essay for Fox’s solo show at Kunsthalle Fridericianum in Kassel, Germany: “The piece uses recorded tape loops of different cats purring to create an auditory metaphor for walking the labyrinth. Each step is replaced by ten seconds of a single cat purring, until the listener reaches the symbolic center when all the cats finally purr together.” Another expansion of the labyrinth metaphor that engaged Fox’s imagination was the pendulum. In a 1977 etching made at Crown Point Press, Fox recorded a pendulum’s progress with acid dripped onto a plate.

Terry Fox has had two Project exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, in 1971 and 1980. He was included in the Whitney Biennial in 1975 and had an exhibition at the important New York performance space, the Kitchen, in 1976. In 1984 he was included in the Venice Biennale. His work is in the collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Berkeley Art Museum, and the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Ottawa, Canada, among other museums. He is represented by Gallery Paule Anglim, San Francisco, and Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York.

http://www.terryfoxart.com