One of the largest undertakings of my life as an artist is on the horizon. This is a preliminary announcement that a project I have been quietly working on for over two years is finally coming to light at the Nasher Museum. At the very beginning of 2020, after a year or so of thinking about it this project idea, I created a piece with Michelle Dorrance of Dorrance Dance. It is a collaborative multi disciplinary intersection of sculpture, movement research/dance, and experimental drawing, with deep rooted philosophical, historical, and even spiritual contextual elements. The new work at the Nasher Museum, which is commissioned and supported by Duke University’s Duke Arts, with a co-sponsorship with ADF, and supported by Cassilhaus with whom I will be in residence this summer, will be in fact created live with a performance by Byron Tittle and Michelle Dorrance on a new art object that I will be constructing out of found materials from both North Carolina and New York City. The geographies of the materials coincide with the geographies of all three collaborators, as well as speak to the (so often misunderstood) history of tap dance, thus creating a large and layered contextual conversation with history, space, and the energies therein. It will happen on June 22nd at the Nasher, and I will be posting more in depth links and information about it next week. A full statement and consideration will be release as the performance nears, regarding the piece itself, the collaborators, its place in history, its intention, and context about the involvement of each entity that has come together to help make it happen.
Photo by Mark Murphy for Dorrance Dance
Michelle Dorrance, Byron Tittle, John Felix Arnold, in New York City.
Shifting Energy, collaborative work by John Felix Arnold, Michelle Dorrance, and Byron Tittle, dance movements on reclaimed wood assemblage panel, 2021
The series, titled Echos, has now seen the creation of 3 pieces thus far, one with, one with both fellow Dorrance Dance dancer Byron Tittle and Michelle, and then one with Carol Parker formerly of Pilobolus Dance Company and the White Oak Dance Project. Here is the statement regarding the larger series.
Echos is an evolving body of work that visualizes the temporal languages of dancers’ movements through experimental modes of drawing. At the core of these movements, dancers channel their personal narratives with the lineages and histories of their disciplines, remaining in conversation with the materials they move upon and the spaces they move within. As a visual artist whose foundation is the language of drawing and whose practice exists in context to a lineage and history of drawing, Echos honors and communicates the relationship between visual art and dance. The work offers an enshrined representation of dancers’ energies, movements, and lifetimes in indelibly visualized moments connected to the larger histories from which they have evolved. It is a conversation honoring genres of dance through new, hybrid forms of image making, incorporating live performance and multidisciplinary works which share the process and intimate reality therein. Echos seeks to honor and offer space to the interwoven threads imbued in the work for current and future generations to experience in a way active performance alone cannot. The work exists as a space for the essence and energy of bodies in motion which transcend our two- and three-dimensional perspectives into a fourth dimension of resonance. Echos is foundationally connected to Duke, ADF, and the history of arts and culture.
I am beyond words that this is all happening, and I am so grateful to everyone that has given this project the love, care, energy, and support needed to see it come to life. More info coming soon! Contact me directly for information or press inquiries. Thank you!
-John Felix Arnold
May 19th, 2022