For nearly a decade, Brooklyn-based artist Steffani Jemison has been deeply invested in examining the ways knowledge is constructed and legitimized.
This interest stems from a fascination with frameworks of interpretation and narration (as well as critical theory), and vernacular traditions, including street acrobatics, vaudeville and Black vernacular genealogies of knowledge. She explores these concepts through a practice that encompasses sculpture, video, installation, sound and fiction writing.
Installation view of “Figure 8” (2021) by Steffani Jemison on the facade of the Everson Museum
Light Work commissioned Jemison to create new work for Urban Video Project (UVP) as part of an annual moving image commission program. The new work, “Figure 8,”comes out of Jemison’s collaboration with athlete Alexis Page.
In conjunction with the exhibition, UVP will host two Zoom-based special events with Jemison and Page, Movement Workshop with Steffani Jemison and Alexis Page at 3 p.m. Sunday, April 11, and My Body Is Opaque: Steffani Jemison and Alexis Page in conversation at 6 p.m. Thursday, April 15. Both events are free and open to the community. Register to participate in one or both of these special communitywide invitations to conversation and movement.
“The title of this programming year at UVP is ‘Inflection Points,’ which is a mathematical term that describes a point of a curve at which a change in the direction occurs. It’s a site of change,” says program director Anneka Herre. “Each year, Light Work commissions an artist to create new work for exhibition at the UVP site, and this year that artist is Steffani Jemison, whose practice is all about finding tools in the past, particularly Black vernacular knowledge and traditions, that make space for radical change.
“When you encounter her work, you can intuit layers of history and a deep rigor—it looks and feels structured and meaningful,” Herre says. “At the same time, the work focuses on the bodily and the gestural, so there is a visceral, somatic, and emotional response to it. Yet, there is also an opacity. The work resists immediate interpretation but compels us to think and move through the process that it enacts. She felt like the perfect artist to work with to create new work for this year, which has been, in so many ways, about the power and mystery of change.”
“Figure 8” is the third exhibition in the UVP 2020-21 exhibition calendar and the third show employing an entirely new, state-of-the-art projection system. Find more info on the UVP website, and here’s a summary of the events:
Outdoor Projection:
Steffani Jemison: “Figure 8”
Everson Museum Plaza | 401 Harrison St. | Syracuse
April 15 – June 5, 2021 | Thursday – Saturday | dusk – 11 p.m.
My Body is Opaque:
Special Events with Steffani Jemison and Alexis Page
Zoom Movement Workshop
Sunday | April 11 | 3 p.m.
Online LINK (Register through button at the top of the page)
Public Artist Talk and Q&A: Steffani Jemison and Alexis Page in Conversation (on Zoom)
Thursday | April 15 | 6:30 p.m.
Online LINK (Register through button at the top of the page)
About the Filmmaker
Jemison is an interdisciplinary artist whose work considers issues that arise when conceptual practices are inflected by black history and vernacular culture. She has participated widely in exhibitions, screenings and readings. In 2011, she presented her collaborative project, “Alpha’s Bet Is Not Over Yet,” at the New Museum of Contemporary Art. She presented her solo project, “Plant You Now, Dig You Later,” at Mass MoCA in 2017-18. The 2019 Whitney Biennial featured her piece “Sensus Plenior.” She has participated in artist residencies at the Core Program at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Project Row Houses and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. She is a past fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University and received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2020. She is currently an assistant professor in media for the Department of Art & Design at Mason Gross at Rutgers University. Her work is represented by Kai Matsumiya gallery.
About the Work
“Figure 8” | 2021 | HD video, color, sound
Credits
Featuring: Alexis Page
Harp: Jess Garland
Additional recording: Steffani Jemison
Sound: Sean T. Davis / the HalfStyle
“Figure 8” describes the movement of the camera, which moves around the body of the performer, as Page muses aloud on continuity and fluency of gesture. Working together, Jemison and Page have created a shared lexicon of movement, which they explore both as a Black feminist research method, an art-making strategy, and as way of approaching the everyday and the at-hand with virtuosity.
Be Safe: Mask Up and Social Distance
Exhibition patrons visiting the Everson Plaza must maintain a social distance of at least 6 feet between individuals at all times, except for groups visiting from the same household. We encourage everyone to wear face masks to safeguard the public health and as an extension of our commitment to help stop the spread of COVID-19. UVP limits attendance at all screenings to 20 people to adhere to Onondaga County’s latest social distancing guidelines.
Sponsors
Support for this exhibition comes from the New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA) with the support of Governor Andrew M. Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.
The movement workshop is co-sponsored by the Everson Museum of Art, the Syracuse University Department of Women’s and Gender Studies and Lender Center for Social Justice, and the Community Folk Art Center.
The artist talk is made possible with the generous support of the Syracuse University College of Visual and Performing Arts Visiting Artist Lecture Series and the Humanities Center as part of the Syracuse Symposium 2020-21 program titled “FUTURES.”
