Trisha Brownã¢ââ¢s ââåfloor of the Forestã¢ââ Henry Art Gallery
Choreographer Will Rawls on Opacity and the Glitch
In his get-go solo exhibition, "Everlasting Stranger," at Seattle'southward Henry Art Gallery, New York–based choreographer, performer, and author Will Rawls charts circuitous relations among gesture, linguistic communication, and image. In the performances that anchor the exhibition, four dancers methodically motility letter tiles hung on a gallery wall to spell out abstract phrases while shifting inside the frame of an automated camera that takes a photograph every few seconds. From a stone rotunda at the entrance to the exhibition, an audio track of excerpts recited from Guyanese author Wilson Harris's 1987 surrealist novel The Infinite Rehearsal plays and echoes through the halls of the exhibition. Further on, pixelated wall paintings, black geometric sculptural forms, and looped terminate-motion animations of the dance flank the performance infinite. Across half-dozen galleries, the installation plays with ruptures and compressions of time. Below, Rawls discusses the role of the glitch in his work, and the seen and unseen labor of dance. "Everlasting Stranger" is on view through August xv.
AURORA SAN MIGUEL Exhibitions make things highly visible to an audience. Throughout the show, still, you also endeavour to obscure certain elements: missing frames in the projected terminate-move videos create glitches while the live performers' movements into and out of view of the camera too point to a type of glitch.
Volition RAWLS The glitch is the moment when you lot recognize a break in the flow of engineering science. Humans like to explore technology partly to see information technology fail to fully mimic or represent man life. Representation is a faulty human invention—this is e'er the starting point for my piece of work. I insist on this faultiness in "Everlasting Stranger." I've also wondered how to explore trip the light fantastic toe documentation that acknowledges its failure to capture the live dance, and becomes an artwork itself. Stop-motion animation is a super-durational form of filmmaking that can reverberate the time it takes to create a trip the light fantastic. Stop-motion is intensively photographic, requiring eight hundred photos for roughly 1-and-a-one-half minutes of animation. This amplifies the capture of the body and alludes to photography's legacy of distorting representations of Black and brownish people. Dance is a dynamic counterpoint because information technology eludes language and image. When you watch the stop-motion pieces, you can sense the gestures that are missing betwixt frames, and and so the kinetics that you do meet on the screen are structured by those missing gestures.
SAN MIGUEL The exhibition makes apparent the intense labor involved in both the performances and their recording. I was specially struck by the audible clicks of the photographic camera as a blazon of metronome for the dancers. Betwixt clicks there is a measure of intent in each of their moves.
RAWLS I wanted to foreground trip the light fantastic's relation to music and to marked time. I also wanted to present the homo labor of condign a moving image, the duress of being captured on camera. The dancers and I discussed the interval, or what transpires betwixt shutter clicks—sensation, thought, and choice—as things that the camera tin't quite capture but that the alive audience sees and feels. The interval between photographs is a infinite of play.
SAN MIGUEL What happens to the photos and videos after the exhibition, and what is their function as documents of this slowness? Video can easily become another mechanism for speed and reductionism.
RAWLS I'yard attached to the films and videos of Kara Walker and William Kentridge, who both, albeit differently, deal with blitheness's complex relationships to text, race, gesture, and history. I feel that both artists accost history in a glitchy way, using technologies that confute their infidelity to what they're representing. I'll take about twenty,000 photos of the functioning over the course of the exhibition—still deciding where these will go next.
SAN MIGUEL On New York'due south High Line in 2018, in your Uncle Rebus performance, you worked with similar techniques—deconstructing and reconstructing movable letter tiles into isolated phrases. I am curious about your choices of linguistic communication and their source text that comes upwards in the performance and, in the form of sonic excerpts, earlier you lot enter the gallery space.
RAWLS The Infinite Rehearsal is a surrealist novel about a child'due south fever dream in which writer Wilson Harris examines the genealogy of identity as a problem of breakthrough physics. I distilled the novel into a set of stanzas that the performers spell, line by line, using oversize letters. The performers don't take plenty letters to fully spell the phrases and are prompted to replace messages with punctuation. Ane of my favorite lines from the text is "Come and live with me earlier the world ends." This appears in the performance as: "BE–four / THA / WRLD ENDS." In the process of spelling, the wall becomes a space of emergence for syllables, phonetics, typos, dialects, even stammers between sentences. Deleuze describes stuttering equally linguistic communication growing from the inside out; that disruption of normative language attracts me. I'm fatigued to the moment when a dialect emerges from—or, rather, against—a standard English narrative or any kind of master text. As a Caribbean author, Harris writes near consciously crafting linguistic communication as a political form of self-study, imagination, and expression. I see parallels betwixt his work on creolization and the Black American oral tradition. That was my starting bespeak for deconstructing language and movable type in Uncle Rebus, where I intervened in Brer Rabbit tales to render the narration perhaps more than opaque simply also more personal and fluid. These projects have been a meaningful way to expose how dancers' thinking manifests in language, over fourth dimension.
Source: https://www.artnews.com/art-in-america/interviews/will-rawls-henry-art-gallery-seattle-1234601546/
0 Response to "Trisha Brownã¢ââ¢s ââåfloor of the Forestã¢ââ Henry Art Gallery"
Enregistrer un commentaire