Groundings explores movement through a series of residencies with artists who work in dance, music, and performance art alongside works from the MCA Collection that explore motion in a variety of forms. During the run of the exhibition, the performers hold open rehearsals in the gallery space, creating performances and physical objects that document their different practices. The exhibition considers how movement is integral to the artistic process and its relationship to identity, place, and action, and evokes the invisible forces that govern bodies in motion such as gravity and time. Organized by MCA Assistant Curator Grace Deveney and MCA Associate Curator of Performance Tara Aisha Willis, Groundings unfolds gradually, leaving viewers and performers alike to discover the traces of the residencies that came before them.
PERFORMANCE SCHEDULE
Open rehearsals for Groundings take place from January 15 to April 6, 2019 on Tuesdays from 1 to 6 pm and Wednesday through Saturday from noon to 5 pm. In progress performances take place at 6 pm on Fridays.
PERFORMERS-IN-RESIDENCE
Anna Martine Whitehead
Open rehearsals January 15-19, In progress performance on January 18
For her residency, Anna Martine Whitehead works on Notes on Territory, a performance lecture about architecture and freedom centered on ideas of space, surveillance, sound, and light. Whitehead explores the architecture of the museum as well as the constraints and flexibilities of the Groundings gallery, adding to her research on how certain architectures - such as prisons and public housing - shape bodily movement.
Mariana Valencia
Open rehearsalsJanuary 29 - February 2, In progress performanceon February 1
Mariana Valencia uses her own stories of growing up in Chicago to explore various ways of making sound. The dance for her Groundings project will be developed from different stepping forms of American folk dances, tap, and flamenco, and prompts her audience to learn, listen, and think about their own narratives and production of sound.
Rosé Hernandez
Open rehearsals February 26 - March 2,In progress performance on March 1
Rosé utilizes the gallery space as a performance lab for the creation of Viscera, a durational performance that uses movement to ask questions about personal identity. The piece draws from themes of early Italian Renaissance sculpture, such as the draped nude, to explore the various ways the human figure has been monumentalized in history.
Jennifer Harge
Open rehearsals March 19-23,In progress performance on March 22
Jennifer Harge is in the process of developing TOMBOY, an immersive exhibition exploring black space and black queer liberation practices. During her residency, Harge develops and experiments with a series of written prompts or 'scores' that cultivate intimacy within the public gallery space, investigating how mundane interactions take on new meaning in the context of a museum gallery.
Patricia Nguyen
Open rehearsals March 26-30,In progress performance on March 29
Patricia Nguyen sews herself into moving sculptures, experimenting with her own breath and khăn tang, a white fabric used in Vietnamese death ceremonies to honor lost lives. During this residency, the fabric's measurements are based on the dimensions of various detention centers across the US, while the thread is sourced from the flags of countries that have signed repatriation agreements with the US. Nguyen imagines possibilities for transgression as her body slips across the cracks, fissures, and holes created by these materials, investigating gestures of resistance within and through conditions of capture.
Brandon Markell Holmes
Open rehearsals April 2-6,In progress performance on April 5
Brandon Markell Holmes turns his five hours a day, five days a week spent in theGroundingsgallery into a piece called Office Hours. Diligently marking time, Holmes investigates how time passes, how the present moment can be suspended, and the ways time can be used as an artistic medium and manipulated through music and photography.
