Gestures Investigating the Good and Not So Good In Relationships – As Shown to Us by Blondell Cummings

Visual, sound, and performance artists Katherine Simóne Reynolds and A.J. McClenon experiment with translating their 2022 video collaboration from its previous online format into a three-dimensional, multi-channel installation with live performance interventions.

The artists riff on 1980s archival footage of influential choreographer and video artist Blondell Cummings (1944–2015) performing at The Kitchen NYC, which also commissioned the original version of this project. Revisiting their own video work Reynolds and McClenon share Cummings’s preoccupation with domestic spaces and everyday, physical practices of sustenance and relation that occur inside them.

Cummings used a stop-motion–like choreographic practice she called “moving pictures” that manipulated how her quotidian, expressive gestures were perceived in time and space, like traces of memory in quick succession. Such choreographic processes turned Cummings into both photographic subject and photographer—choosing and ordering her own image, at once being surveyed and surveying the world closely.

Reynolds and McClenon build on the intimacy Cummings created between herself and her observations of the world through these embodied love letters to Black domestic experience: a partial buffer from an anti-Black world. How do visibility, opacity, public, and private function when framed at once within the stage, screen, and home?

This sequence of somatic, gestural “how to’s” for living a domestic Black life first took the form of a video work shot in the public but intimate space of an open lot in Chicago. Translated into Studio 1—Goodman, the videos are housed in a shifting, home-like interior holding moving image, soundscape, and body, allowing the artists to physically intervene in how and when the original videos are witnessed. In this simultaneously protective and exposed enclosure, the artists move through cooking, holding hands and holding their breath, silently weeping, and loudly surviving.

Audiences can enter the installation at any time. On the first day of the festival, the artists perform intermittently; then, the traces of their presence remain in the space on the second day.