all our days are full of breath: a record of momentum brings together two artists who foreground the body and movement as material in evolving choreographic and installation-based works. Jessica Karuhanga and Brandy Leary transform the gallery into a place of kinesthetic field work: part performance, part laboratory, part choreographed sculpture. The artists utilize bodies, gestures and reciprocal objects as their materials. Their work strives to mine personal, cultural, ancestral, and corporeal archives.
The spectrum of the new archive created in the process offers a multitude of exits from and entrances to the artists’ work. It is not fixed and inert, but fluid and permeable, and constantly breathing. This exhibition explores endurance of the ephemeral and its transmission as a critical aspect of performance, and shows the subsequent creation of information and data that extend and enhance the experience. The performance lives on in the viewer. What we say, think, witness, and dance, leaves traces. Some visible. Some less visible. All real and none more or less actual than the other. The gap between live performance and physical traces of its movements draws attention to the presence and absence of the body, considering “how performance comes off the body.” *
Working collaboratively with artists and objects to create a space of deceleration, Leary’s work explores transmissive expanses of gesture through divergent dance and movement forms that offer spaces of effort and failure, expertise and unknowing, as well as curiosity through a post-disciplinary lens. In Karuhanga’s work, objects and gestures will be collectively determined and negotiated by performers. Mining personal archives and collective digital data, performers utilize these materials as a channel, understanding that all matter carries weight and all objects are both their presence and weight of their history.
* from a conversation with Francisco-Fernando Granados