Visual Art
Moving Body, Moving Study
12—5pm daily with extended hours before evening performances in the Fishman Space
Co-curated with Rachel Valinsky
Publications by Wendy’s Subway
Design objects and furniture generously presented in partnership with Colony
This fall, Next Wave Art presents an exhibition of time- and movement-based work that explores the body’s capacity for remembering. In Moving Body, Moving Study, we consider the ways in which artists score, archive, or otherwise embed gestures and movement to relay accumulated experience, trauma, and historical and cultural memory. Engaging the BAM Fisher Lower Lobby as a space for reflection and refuge, this unique program features three screenings rotated monthly, readings and public events, and newly commissioned print publications.
October featured artists Freya Powell, Sable Elyse Smith and Patty Chang. November featured artists Lauren Bakst, Jesse Chun, Kerry Downey and Joanna Seitz. December featured Kevin Jerome Everson, Jibade-Khalil Huffman and Gloria Maximo.
To learn more about or to purchase the artists’ publications from Moving Body, Moving Study click here.
Leadership support for BAM Visual Art provided by Agnes Gund and Toby Devan Lewis
On Fire like Hell Fire Powell gathers the harrowing accounts of prisoners’ exposure to chemical weapons into a polyphony of voices relating the injustices suffered through gassing and medical negligence and the lasting physical and psychological trauma resulting from these experiences. Freya Powell is a New York based artist exploring language to present the personal and political.
In Untitled: Father Daughter Dance, visual fragments are juxtaposed, including found footage of an arrest, and re-enactments of protocols for prison visitation: emptying pockets, being searched, waiting to be let in. The installation evokes surveillance with cube monitors and draws from her own experience of visiting her father in prisons. Sable Elyse Smith is an interdisciplinary New York based artist exploring the visual and physical language of memory and trauma.
This multi-part video utilizes invocations and repetitions as a structure to explore decay, personal and shared histories and archival research. Building this narrative using images, language, objects and her body, Chang explores the imprints left by atomic bombs of Hiroshima, tea bowls, prayer wheels and her relationship to natural entities such as sacred snow mountains and wandering lakes. Patty Chang is an LA based artist working in performance, video, writing and installation.
Actor and writer Jess Barbagallo opens his monologue filmed in BAM’s Fishman Space with the affirmation, “I am not performing right now, but I am a performer.” Bakst’s video reexamines what makes performance viewable, to better trace the many forms it takes. Lauren Bakst is a New York based artist and writer working at the interstices of language and movement. Her newest work, More Problems with Form, premieres at The Chocolate Factory Theater in March 2019.
Intangible Heritage is a karaoke video essay featuring an electronic version of a 2,000 year-old folk song, registered by both South and North Korea for UNESCO’s Intangible Heritage list in 2012 and 2014, respectively. Taking systems of power, meaning, and bureaucracy as a site of departure, Chun’s work addresses visibility and poetics of diasporic languaging. Jesse Chun is a visual artist living in New York. Her work is currently included in the Queens International 2018: Volumes.
In Weather Report, Downey and Seitz balance landscape and portraiture through the video’s split screen. Their measured choreography negotiate the relation between body and the environment, object and subject, revealing forms of mutual care and shared process. Kerry Downey is an interdisciplinary artist and educator based in New York. Their work is currently on view in How to see in the dark at Cuchifritos Gallery. Joanna Seitz is an artist and designer living and working in New York City.
The Release references an old American football move. Working with James Benning’s students at CalArts, Everson translate the athletic gesture to performance for the camera. Denaturalized, slowed down, or repeated, release appears both theatrical and familiar as Everson highlights the formal qualities of everyday gestures. Kevin Jerome Everson lives and works in Charlottesville, VA. His work is included in the 57th Carnegie International and is a 2018 Walker Art Center Moving Image Commission.
Figuration (B) incorporates archival and pop cultural sources from the 80s to today, layered with a soundtrack composed of found and made sources. Huffman produces a dense, non-linear image stream that explores questions of representation, display, and power in a broad sense—and the representation of the Black male figure, in and through media, in particular. Jibade-Khalil Huffman is an artist and writer based in New York. His solo exhibition, Tempo, is currently on view at The Kitchen.
Maximo’s work centers realist subjects through a formal vocabulary that deploys figural representation and body language in performance, and abstraction in painting. In her video Payday and painting, Payday (ATM), Maximo explores the low wage labor and contingent employment that bind the individual worker to dominant institutions. Gloria Maximo lives and works in New York. Her work is currently included in the Queens International 2018: Volumes and Not for Everybody at Simone Subal Gallery.