Urban Video Project and Light Work have announced the exhibition of the video piece “in Court (Basketball)” by Yvonne Buchanan at UVP Everson from Feb. 14-March 31. This exhibition is presented in collaboration with the Everson Museum of Art, which will feature Buchanan’s video and sound installation “Strange Tongue” through March 31 inside the Everson’s galleries.
In her video work, Buchanan creates micronarratives of the ghostly presence of histories. Collective and individual experiences of otherness, the traumas sustained and the strategies employed to endure these experiences are the focus of her recent work. Her subject is often the black body as object and symbol, the embodiment of curiosity and a dark and weighty presence.
“in Court (Basketball)” features a basketball court where the hopes and dreams of young black men are played out, at the same time as it seems to fluctuate between a site for sport and a cage. The projection of the piece at the UVP Everson venue, with its close proximity to the Onondaga County jail, takes on a special and literal resonance with the audible but invisible play of the inmates on the rooftop court of the nearby correctional facility.
Buchanan will give an artist talk in the Everson’s Hosmer Auditorium on Thursday, Feb. 21, at 6:30 p.m.
Buchanan is currently associate professor of art, design and transmedia at the College of Visual and Performing Arts. Her work has been featured in shows and festivals nationally and internationally, including Rencontres Internationales 2006 (Berlin and Paris); the 2008 Whitney Biennial (as part of “Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms” at the Armory); and the Slamdance Festival; as well as showing at Anthology Film Archives in New York; UCLA’s Hammer Museum; and most recently at the Everson Museum of Art as part of TONY 2012.
