Rashaad Newsome "Shade Compositions"
Location One
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Have pop culture and globalization co-opted the wonderfully expressive gestures of the black America female? This is the question that Rashaad Newsome explores in video and photography in Shade Compositions.
In the second work, Untitled (study for banji cunt), Newsome brings choreography for the first time into his expressive repertoire. For this piece the artist invited one of New York’s top vogue dancers, Shayne Oliver, to his studio and recorded his demonstration. From the footage he created a choreographed piece in post-production by connecting different dance sequences. Shayne Oliver was then asked to practice and reinterpret this dance, and to perform it before a camera. The resulting video (8 minute loop) will be shown in Location One’s Project Space, along with ten photographs of specific dance moves from the initial recording session.
“The language of the body has a vocabulary all its own,” says Newsome, whose residency at Location One is sponsored by the Rockefeller Brothers Foundation. “Gestural language is often viewed as a cultural signifier, and I am interested in how it is formed, how it evolves as well as how it is appropriated across regional and class boundaries. I think of dance as a means of communication that can reflect a world bigger then the one I live in, one that can reflect many different people, cultures and times.”
[Image: Rashaad Newsome "Untitled (study for banji cunt)"]
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Schedule
from June 19, 2008 to July 26, 2008