choreographies of becoming ( a film )

erika roos MFA thesis exhibition

Reception: April 17, 4:00 - 6:00 p.m.
April 14 - April 17, 1:00 - 4:00 p.m. or by appointment
Performance Space, Visual Arts Facility, UC San Diego

choreographies of becoming ( a film ) is a site-sensitive installation and durational performance with 16mm film. In this work, I position the filmic apparatus – specifically, the celluloid film, projectors, light, and screen-surface – as a composite, complex, and interconnected body, as an organism, and as a performer. Through the interwoven, looping bodies of projector, film, and screen – which cast images of figures in shadow – this installation contends with how we hold memory: in movement, in muscle, in celluloid, in textile, in our relationships with one another. Central to this work are reflections on research and practice within contemporary dance, performance, and experimental filmmaking; queer phenomenological research and writings on touch, contingency, and the affects of cinematic experience; critical materialist and agential realist concepts of complexity, interdependence, and entanglement; the phenomenon of missing time (known in geology as unconformities); and the phenomenon of the loop. Lineages of avant-garde film, performance, and expanded cinema practices within postwar Japan and the United States also inform this work.