Group exhibition B-side: (Damaged) Reminiscence and Remix attracts upon and immortalizes strategies essential to the preservation of Black innovation and expertise as advised by way of Hip-Hop’s manufacturing strategies reimagined: sampling, splicing, and storytelling. Exemplary of those parts is Raque Ford’s checkered plexiglass dance ground on view at Brooklyn’s BRIC Home by way of January twenty first. Inside the exhibit’s expansive, interactive framework – in some methods actually – lies the potential to vogue recent futures from cultural artifacts with a poetic resonance certain to proceed lengthy after the present closes.
The bodily 12-foot-by-12-foot dance ground floor is an amalgam of laser reduce acrylic tiles in deep teal, black, tangerine, and metallic silver. The monotype prints relate materially and thru content material, typically remixing parts from earlier tasks, that includes texts which might be painted previous to lamination on yellow rubber atop an MDF platform. The narrative composition is intimate and derived from Ford’s personal repository.
“I usually hold my writing within the notes app on my cellphone. It’s a mixture of my private musings and what I’ve overheard or learn that I’m drawn to. I hold a diary of kinds for all this and when it’s time to make a piece I reread by way of it and add and merge ideas that I really feel replicate the place I’m for the time being of making the work,” Ford says. “This piece specifically is all discovered textual content. There’s a line from the Godard movie Contempt, a quote from a TikTok about renovating an unpleasant fire, and lastly an excerpt from a New York Occasions article about Beverly Buchanan and her yellow VW Beetle.”
As with every iteration of her signature method, technical challenges come up whereas bringing it to fruition. It’s paramount that the work be designed with modular elements, and that the acrylic squares will be simply disassembled for assortment after the exhibition with the intent of repurposing them throughout the subsequent “remix” – an inherently sustainable artwork apply. In doing so, the dance ground elements are extra like ephemera, fairly actually changing into a bodily file by storing marks left behind from one present to have fun that which is damaged or scratched as soon as recontextualized on the subsequent.
Upon activation, the set up invitations viewers to take part in group efficiency, join with the bodily house, and commune with each other. “Seeing when folks selected to face or sit to observe the efficiency and when folks determined to chill out and dance was thrilling, and it helped me to consider what to vary or add sooner or later.” The daughter of a late Hip-Hop producer and author, Rober Ford, Raque contributes to her legacy in remixing private parts with fashionable tradition all embedded into the zeitgeist.
To search out out extra about B-side: (Damaged) Reminiscence and Remix go to BRICArtsMedia.org.
