A lot has rolled by this summer, even more has blossomed inward. May 19th seems to be the last moment I had the frame of mind to post to the world much of whats going on. Save from a few instagram posts, and a lot of “stories” it has been a full marathon through life, both in art and the growth we all have to both endure and be so lucky to experience, in the service of being realized.
To first notate one of the more important things that happened this summer, the work at the Nasher Museum of Art with Michelle Dorrance and Byron Tittle commissioned by Duke Arts/Performances, and produced in partnership with American Dance Festival and Cassilhaus was incredible. It was a life changing experience and I am grateful in a way I cannot express in words.
Of course there is a lot of work being processed right now, photos, video, audio recordings, writing, all of it for both a future exhibition about movement and the languages of dance (also as a through line to discussions of history and systems of our world) and for cataloguing and to be offered for critical review. The work was nothing short of ethereal, it shook up history and carved a new tapestry of language into old pieces of time’s stubborn body. It felt like a collective moment of possibility where layers of generations of dance born of resistance and community met a body of those who responded en mass ascending as a whole into the rafters of the Nasher Museum in a cacophony of worship to some sort of gods of abundant possibility rather than scarcity. The effect left everyone I spoke to in a daze, a wordless feeling of weightlessness and heightened being.
On an art historical level, the amount of interwoven narratives colliding to create a new form of drawing come conceptual art is something I and my colleagues need to sit down and continue to dove deeper and deeper into. There is writing on my site in the Experimental Works section, but there is more in the works. The idea of drawing as a document of both language and history born of a discipline that was never intended to leave static traces of its temporal nature is something I am extremely excited to push further. And when that idea of drawing comes into view with writing, video and audio in different pairings it opens even more doors to ways we can perceive motion, motion that can even hold us to question our own directions, motives, pathways of daily life and longer term modalities. I have been reading more Smithson accompanied by Merton, two very different minds, and both very seemingly far from this work. Yet both correlate with a lot of core concepts within this, a sense of void in finding the ridiculousness of the system, and a sense of exploring ways to go beyond our notion of what both art and space can be, in how we engage them and to what end we open ourselves to seeing and being.
The Nasher’s great hall saw 300+ people fill its space to witness the creation the three of us embarked on. I spent two weeks sourcing the wood and building the piece of art that acted as the stage for this new work. Wood came from Byron' Tittle’s neighborhood in the Bronx, from Chapel Hill and Orange County where Michelle Dorrance hails from and from Durham where I myself was born and raised. Some of the pieces came from 150 year old barn structures that were falling down to time in the edge of Durham county, some from houses being torn down in the Bronx to make way for new developments, others from piles of beam board and flooring from houses in Chapel Hill Every piece was representative of generations of lived experience in all three places. All brought their own tones and sounds, their own aesthetics to be transformed by the abrasive reality of tap dance, and all brought their stories from times both loving and tumultuous packed in. The transformation of the very essence of these materials, the very energy within them and the very materiality of them was paramount to the idea of transformation which the work invited. That transformation is at its core a vital component to the history of Tap and visual art, thus the entire work created a new form of shift across dimensionality and intersectionality.
Next up. Nature!
The environment in my home state is utterly amazing. The lushness of the greenery is four steps from tropical, yet four steps from piney winter forest. It sits in the middle of crispness and swampy, the pine trees standing majestic in the winter, the kudzu and vines and weeping willows lurching and swaying in the wet summer heaviness. This is a photo of a friends land he bought decades ago in Chatam county. Way out near Pittsboro. A highly contested between racist confederate traditionalist and progressive academics and hippies fighting for equity for all people and fighting for the land. All of it while large development companies are still slowly trying to roll in and clear cut this beautiful ancient growth. Some will some will never go. It’s a bizarre capsule of history, almost timeless in a way, the constant struggle of good and evil, of those who would oppress next to those who would free others from oppression, all in the face of the big wheel that has always wanted to master nature. Nature stands and rules here, it is guarded and protected by many, and it has its songs, it has its scent, it has its physical form. It is a sort of encompassing hot surrounding entity that lets you know it is mighty and glorious, and you are so lucky to enjoy its beauty.
This is a good stopping place. Sometimes I have to let it out in waves, one day this will all be compiled into sections of books wherein the tangents of thoughts leapfrog off of each other for your mental pleasure.
More to come.