“The dance, however, is not an escape. It is a punctuation. It is about claiming an instant of me and something that can be mine completely.” — Sable Elyse Smith, Ecstatic Resilience With caution and sharp delay, NIC Kay descends the steps of Judson Memorial Church. Almost as if to ask the space permission.…
“Does history die if you intentionally repeat it?” Kara Walker Looking into the camera, activist and community organizer, Alejandra Pablos says : “If you are seeing this I just got detained by ICE.” The temporal logics of this sentenc(ing) are dizzying . Pierced between the moments of you are seeing : : just got…
Last fall, I went to see Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty, built at the northeastern edge of the Great Salt Lake in Utah in 1970. I had been invited to speak at Utah State University, and my host, Marissa Vigneault, gamely offered to take me and my teenage daughter to see the site, despite it being…
I used to lie on my back in a field near my parents’ house in the summer, rubbing my closed eyes under the sun until I saw light flicker in red and green on the back of my eyelids. I would see how long I could stand it: the pressure of pushing on my eyes…
I see The Incidental Insurgents for the first time in a small crowded theatre in Montreal. I hear a man say, “The landscapes are so beautiful.” Ruanne Abou-Rahme and Basel Abbas’ piece consists in a rapidly moving assemblage of sound, text, and image. The work is dense and voluble, yet it does not rush resolution.…
Are all pilgrims exhausted? A question gracefully posed by Bay Area artist Asma Kazmi in Indian Mangoes by the Red Sea. In this piece, she offers a moment of devotional interaction between two bodies, human and fruit, demonstrating the capacity to transform under the conditions of ritual in prayer, in consumption, and in journey. The…
Sky Hopinka’s video Dislocation Blues (2017) opens on the visuals of a Skype call, already underway. An Indigenous person peers out from the dialog window, presumably speaking to the audience, represented as a shadowy, blurry, and phantom-like figure in the respondent window. Their tone is personal as if they are talking to a friend or…
A rope bisects the opening shot of Lida Abdul’s film Once Upon Awakening. The rope, itself bisected by a hand grasping its fraying coils, is taut against an unseen weight. The disorienting interlacing of the image emerges during this slow-motion sequence, a quality more like that of consumer home video cameras than the film’s original…
Two preoccupations have sustained our efforts throughout Deep-Time Construction. First is the building of a show and catalog we believe in, filled by the imagination and ideas of people we look to for guidance in our understanding of art. Second is the pressing of the instrument of time in the ongoing continuum of crisis. It…