The Lewis Center for the Arts’ Program in Visual Arts presents an exhibition and performance series, The Movement-Image, curated by Lecturer in Visual Arts Colleen Asper. Six artists will present video, installations, and performance work through the exhibition and scheduled live events. The Movement-Image exhibition runs from October 16 through November 21, 2023, in Hagan Gallery at 185 Nassau Street on the Princeton University campus; the gallery is open weekdays from 9 a.m. until 6 p.m. Performances or workshops with the artists will be held on October 24 at 4:30 p.m. in the James Stewart Film Theater at 185 Nassau St., and on November 1, 7, and 14 at 4:30 p.m. in the Hagan Gallery. All events are free and open to the public, with no tickets or registration required. The gallery and theater are accessible venues. Guests in need of access accommodations are invited to contact the Lewis Center at least one week in advance at lewiscenter@princeton.edu.
The Movement-Image seeks to unspool the motion picture to situate performance in a continuum with film. In Performing Remains, Rebecca Schneider describes the ways in which media studies “conflates the invention of the still with the invention of the camera, too often forgetting the long history of precedent living stills.” The Movement-Image likewise sees across disciplinary divides to a long history of movement, and the featured artists understand the living body as a force of continuous invention, Asper notes.
About the Exhibition
The Movement-Image exhibition features video works and installations by six artists including Amy Beecher, Xavier Cha, Sahra Motalebi, Maho Ogawa, Will Rawls and Leila Weefur:
Beecher’s seven-minute single shot film Holding Lead is part of a larger series of work, Beautiful, Beautiful, Beautiful, Rose! that includes, poetry, sound, image, and installation. Work in this series appropriates and then isolates moments from the television series The Bachelor, using them as formal building blocks to meditate on the over-determined nature of signifiers, especially those linked to feelings of love and affection. Echoing the themes of admiration in the original show, each work in the series is an homage to a different artist. Here Beecher responds to Richard Serra’s three-minute film Hand Lead Fulcrum, replacing the weighty block of lead in Serra’s muscular grip with a delicately perched flower.
Cha’s Untitled (caretaker) is a livestreamed video performance where a performer, who wears a GoPro chest harness, can be seen moving alone in a rehearsal space. The audience experiences a disorienting view of limbs moving through a remote studio. The video captures only glimpses of their reflection in the mirror, obscuring access to the full view of the performer’s body. Fragments of a soundtrack can be heard playing simultaneously from four corners of the studio as the performer nears.
Motalebi’s Inspiration explores historical meanings of “imagination,” its connection to metaphor-making, and to the breath. The vocal dialogue, heard from small speakers inserted in the sculpture, includes a description of the object and its invisible built structures and those of the stage-set itself. The silver ductwork taken from building materials is recontextualized; it gives one the sense of a technological construction, and referencing the mediation of breath, voice, and dialogue by the logics of performance and a disembodied acousmatic presence.
Choreographic Score Mural is an abstract map of human bodies, a mural version of Ogawa’s online movement database, Minimum Movement Catalog, an online movement lexicon created by Ogawa. Each line in the mural expresses a visual movement score from the Minimum Movement Catalog sections “Curving” or “Bending,” inventories of bodily gestures. Viewers can embody the Bending or Curving movements by placing their body along these lines. In the gallery, this mural is open to be activated by viewers as a communication tool for movement language.
Still from the video, regular degular, by Will Rawls. Photo courtesy of Will Rawls
Rawls’s regular degular is a cinematic response to the disparate architectural, economic, and historical tensions that surface in St. Louis, Missouri. These conflicts are embodied along historic Jefferson Avenue and exist because of, and are constantly reproduced by, an anti-Black formation of American cities that raze or renew neighborhoods based on their racial and economic make-up, notes the artist. Multiple understandings of time and narrative share geographic space but are not in active conversation. This temporal and architectural non-communication becomes an opportunity to invent a narrative structure that connects these dynamics. regular degular is a short stop-motion film that seeks to tell a new story of a place that respectfully and playfully acknowledges these local conditions.
Weefur’s Blackberry Pastorale: Symphony No. 1 deconstructs the Black Femme figure and the colloquial Black phrase “The blacker the berry, the sweeter the juice.” The video constructs a cinematic narrative through the landscape of the blackberry fruit, positing the Blackberry as a figure with a distinct racialized function. Referencing Yusef Komunyakaa’s 1992 poem “Blackberries” and Wallace Thurman’s 1929 novel The Blacker the Berry, the installation explores the kindred history of Blackberries with Black bodies and the contradictions of beauty, shame, admiration, and contempt. The sound component, Fantasie Negre, is a composition by Florence Beatrice Price, the first Black woman to be recognized as a symphonic composer. This layered orchestral piano provides the video with a texture, rich with an Antebellum-like history and a queasy contemplation to match the choreographed destruction of the Blackberry fruit.
About the Performances
In conjunction with The Movement-Image exhibition, four of the artists will present performances or workshops:
On October 24, Weefur will present On Filth and Fantasy, a lecture performance merging cinema, embodiment, and the symbiotic nature of beauty and horror in the Black queer experience as seen in their video installation work, Blackberry Pastorale.
Two dancers activate the installation Choreographic Score Mural Demo by Maho Ogawa. Photo by Alyssa Soethout
On November 1, Annie Wang and jay beardsley will join Ogawa to activate her Choreographic Score Mural. By chance, the dancers will select and enact one or two bending movements from the Minimum Movement Catalog. The spontaneous combinations of abstract lines created by the dancers will occur only once following the philosophy of Ichigo-Ichie in Japanese culture: right now, this moment is once in a lifetime. Along with its purpose as a public mural, the performance creates communication methods to bridge movement and visual language, acts to appreciate and challenge recording and ephemerality, and re-evaluates the subjectivity of movement language.
On November 7, Motalebi offers a collaborative workshop as the latest iteration of her ongoing project VOICE/S. Begun in 2018, these workshop sessions expand definitions of the “voice,” inspiring a network of open-ended questions that consider individual and collective vocalities. Motalebi finds that in doing so, the collaborators discover unexpected resonances and a multiplicity of poetics and learn that listening is an aspect of the voice itself. All are welcome at the workshop and all levels of experience with the voice will be accommodated.
Closing the series on November 14, Cha will present Untitled (caretaker) with a unique performance livestreamed to the Hagan Gallery. Cha originally made the work in 2020, at the height of pandemic quarantine in New York. This work, like the artist’s previous works, questions spectator roles and familiarity with and access to modes of viewing and witnessing in current highly mediated cultures. Aiming to examine the experience many share of struggling in isolation—of sheer desperation, alienation, and escapism during moments of panic or internal crisis—Untitled (caretaker) rethinks the performing body’s agency and questions the witnessing of bodies in times of crisis and collapse.
About the Visiting Artists and Curator
Cha was born in Los Angeles and lives in New York. They received a B.F.A. from the Rhode Island School of Design and an M.F.A. from University of California, Los Angeles. Cha has had recent solo exhibitions at Commonwealth and Council, Los Angeles; Empty Gallery, Hong Kong; Cleveland’s Museum of Contemporary Art; 47 Canal, New York; Aspect/Ratio, Chicago; and the Whitney Museum of American Art. Cha has staged large scale performance works at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Zacheta National Gallery of Art in Poland, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Santa Barbara, Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, and elsewhere. Cha is the recipient of a Harkness/BAM Dance Residency, a Frieze Film Commission, a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, and a Guggenheim Fellowship.
Motalebi is an artist, vocalist, writer, and educator. She has exhibited her work and performed at Brief Histories, The Kitchen, MoMA PS1, New Museum, SculptureCenter, and Swiss Institute. Motalebi participated in the 79th Whitney Biennial in 2019. In 2020-2021, she was a Visual Arts Fellow at Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute. She teaches in community-based learning spaces and university settings. Her current research includes voice studies, group creativity, and embodiment. She lives in upstate New York.
Ogawa is a Japanese-born multidisciplinary movement artist working in New York City since 2011. Her work has delved into building a choreographic language based on nuances and isolated movements of the body that she has built into a database, Minimum Movement Catalog. Ogawa’s works have been presented in New York City at Domestic Performance Agency, Invisible Dog Art Center, Abrons Art Center, Movement Research at the Judson Memorial Church and Snug Harbor Cultural Center, among others. In Korea and Japan, she has shown work at Za Koenji, Tokyo Culture Creation Project, Akiyoshidai International Art Village, and Whenever Wherever Festival. She is a 2023 Associated Artist at the Culture Push.
Weefur is an artist, writer, and independent curator based in Oakland, California. Their interdisciplinary practice, centered around architectural video installation, examines the performative elements connected to systems of belonging present in Black, queer, gender-variant life. The work brings together concepts of sensorial memory, Black eco-geographies, and the erotic. Weefur has worked with local and national institutions including The Kitchen, Locust Projects, The Wattis Institute, McEvoy Foundation, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Museum of the African Diaspora, and Smack Mellon. Weefur is an educator at Stanford University and a member of the curatorial film collective, The Black Aesthetic.
Asper is an artist based in Brooklyn, New York, who uses painting, writing, and performance to play with voiding and doubling the body. She has had solo and two-person exhibitions at venues including 17Essex, Stellar Projects, On Stellar Rays, P!, Art Production Fund Lab, and Steven Wolf Fine Arts. Asper’s work has been included in numerous group exhibitions in the United States and abroad at venues such as Kunstverein Langenhagen in Germany, Lošinj Museum in Croatia, The Luminary in St. Louis, and in New York City at Art in General, The Drawing Center, and Queens Museum. Her work has been reviewed in Artforum, frieze, Art in America, The New York Times, and The New Yorker. Additionally, she has contributed writing to publications including Art Practical, The Brooklyn Rail, Lacanian Ink, and Paper Monument. Asper has been a resident at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Wendy’s Subway (with the Art Workers’ Inquiry), Elizabeth Murray Artist Residency, and the Jentel Artist Residency. She was appointed lecturer in Princeton’s Program in Visual Arts in 2018. This fall, Asper is co-teaching the visual arts course “Facing Difference: Visual Politics and the Body” and regularly teaches painting courses.
The Movement-Image series is supported through Princeton’s John Sacret Young ’69 Lecture Series fund. Sacret Young (1946-2021) was a 1969 graduate of Princeton and an author, producer, director, and screenwriter. He was nominated for seven Emmy Awards and seven Writers Guild of America (WGA) Awards, winning two WGA Awards. He is perhaps best known for co-creating, along with William F. Broyles Jr., China Beach, the critically acclaimed ABC-TV drama series about medics and nurses during the Vietnam War, and for his work on the television drama The West Wing. Young also received a Golden Globe and a Peabody Award, and his original mini-series about the Gulf War, Thanks of a Grateful Nation, was honored with his fifth Humanitas Prize nomination.
Visit the Lewis Center website to learn more about the Program in Visual Arts and the more than 100 public performances, exhibitions, readings, screenings, concerts, lectures, and special events, most of them free, presented each year by the Lewis Center for the Arts.
