taisha paggett. i believe in echoes (in collaboration with Kim Zumpfe). Installation view, Audain Gallery, 2018. Photo: Blaine Campbell.
taisha paggett: i believe in echoes
October 11 - December 8, 2018
Audain Gallery
In collaboration with artist Kim Zumpfe.
taisha paggett is a dance artist who cultivates independent and collaborative performance works for the stage, gallery and outdoors. Her research and pedagogical engagement focuses on the relationship between geography and being, in order to navigate 21st-century Black American life. The artistic results explore how gesture and breath may help make life within uninhabitable conditions inhabitable.
i believe in echoes considers somatic experience within the "meadow," a phenomenological and speculative geography that supports physical and psychic embodiment in the out-of-doors. The "meadow" evokes the dance studio, the green room, the white cube, and the theatre. It is an ecosystem of consciousness in which fugitive bodies query the historical delineation of inside-outside, and the social hierarchies that determine access and restriction.
Drawing on broader conversations on the Black Outdoors, such as Saidiya Hartman's consideration of the totality of racial-sexual-ecological enclosure, Fred Moten's potentiality of the out-of-outside, and Katherine McKittrick's visualization of Black women's geographies, paggett continues her work on creating breathing room for the echoes of multiple histories to be felt and heard.
paggett is based in Los Angeles and her work has been presented at LACE, Los Angeles; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Doris McCarthy Gallery, Toronto; and The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York. She is faculty in University of California Riverside's Department of Dance, and artistic director of WXPT dance company and the School for the Movement of the Technicolor People.
paggett is the School for the Contemporary Arts' 2018 Audain Visual Artist in Residence, which is co-presented by SFU Galleries. Her project is supported by Canada Council for the Arts, Western Front and UBC Okanagan's Department of Creative Studies 2018 Summer Indigenous Art Intensive.
Kim Zumpfe is a Los Angeles-based artist and educator. Her work has been exhibited at LACE, Los Angeles; Diverseworks, Houston; Grand Central Arts Center, Santa Ana; Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego; Human Resources, Los Angeles; and UCR Culver Center for the Arts, Riverside. She is a member of the WXPT dance company and a contributing collaborator to the School for the Movement of Technicolor People.
Curated by Amy Kazymerchyk
Events
Workshop: "the meadow" research studio
Tuesdays, Thursdays September 25 - October 11, 6:30 - 8:30pm
SFU, 149 W. Hastings St., Vancouver
Talk: taisha paggett (SCA Visual Art - 611 Talks)
Thursday, September 20, 1 - 2pm
611 Alexander St. Studios, Vancouver
Talk: taisha paggett (SCA Dance, Theatre and Performance)
Friday, September 21, 12:30 - 2pm
Room 4525, SFU, 149 W. Hastings St., Vancouver
Opening Reception and Performance
Wednesday, October 10, 7 - 9pm
Audain Gallery
taisha paggett will perform in the gallery from 7 - 8pm. Her engagement with the exhibition will be emergent, mobile and aural. Audience members are invited to enter and exit the gallery throughout the performance.
Talk: taisha paggett and Aisha Sasha John in conversation
Friday, October 12, 7pm
Audain Gallery
taisha paggett will be joined by Toronto-based poet, dancer and choreographer, Aisha Sasha John for an embodied conversation. Situated within i believe of echoes, they will think, feel and move through resonant and related themes in their respective performance practices which consider the body's experience of breath and voice in place.
Aisha Sasha John is a Toronto-based choreographer and poet whose 2017 collection of poetry, I have to live. was finalist for the 2018 Griffin Poetry Prize. Her solo performance the aisha of is premiered at the Whitney Museum in 2017, and in 2018 was presented by Montréal, arts interculturels and Toronto's Summerworks Festival. From 2015-2017, John choreographed, performed and curated as a member of the performance collective WIVES.
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