This exhibition brings together four visual artists and a choreographer whose works offer remarkable methods for engaging history. Each artist tells history—or suggests historical content and the past—not only through evidence and straightforward narrative, but by heavily reworking their source materials to such a degree that they become condensed, dramatically expanded, or referenced in exquisite, curious, or missing objects. These artists’ practices involve language (many are also poets and writers) and entail close attention to materials and form. While photography holds a special relationship for artists who draw from archives, this exhibition also encompasses sculpture, installation, and choreography as simultaneously specific and expansive fields in conversation with one another.
Degrees of Archive encompasses these artists’ research-driven practices conducted over several years. They reckon with intergenerational settler colonialism, theorize and practice Black and queer tactics of refusal and assembly, and embrace the complicated yet playful role of the artist as author and performer. The works on view are often modular and scalable, ready to be adapted for other venues or presented for a specific duration. Unapologetically conceptual and ambitious in scope, these works take up Haitian American scholar Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s provocative description that “archives assemble”—that is, the stuff of history is not passive; but instead gathers us as thinkers and actors in the worlds we want to craft together.
Featuring works by Anna Campbell, Devin T. Mays, Tere O’Connor, Jadine Pluecker, and Charisse Pearlina Weston.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Anna Campbell (based in New York City and Madison, Wisconsin) is an artist, designer, and professor whose sculptures, installations, video, and ephemera examine queer history and desire. Their work ranges from site-specific installation to oral history-driven video installation, and insists on intimate engagement with material metaphors.
Devin T. Mays’s (based in Chicago and Galveston, Texas) interdisciplinary practice is an exercise in wandering he often refers to as a practice-in-practice. Mays creates poetic gestures of observation and ritual through sculpture and installation, sound, performance, and photography.
Tere O’Connor (based in New York City and Champaign) has created numerous works for his dance company as well as commissions for many others, touring across the world. His choreography explores intuition, memory, and time-play with the stage as framing device. He is an articulate and provocative educator, mentor, and writer, and he is a Center for Advanced Studies Professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, teaching in the Department of Dance, as well as a longtime faculty member at Movement Research in New York.
Jadine (JD) Pluecker (based in Houston, Texas) works with language, that is, a material thing, a thing of life and history. Her undisciplinary work inhabits the intersections of writing, history, translation, art, interpreting, bookmaking, queer/trans aesthetics, non-normative poetics, language justice, and cross-border cultural production.
Charisse Pearlina Weston (based in Harlem, New York) is a conceptual artist and writer whose work emerges from deep material investigations of the symbolic and literal curls, layerings, and collapses of space, poetics, and the autobiographical. She contends with the dynamic interplay of violence and intimacy through repetition, enfoldment, and concealment.
Degrees of Archive is part one of contemporary art and the shape of history, a multiyear series of exhibitions, curatorial research seminars, and performances about contemporary artists engaging history and their calls for historical reckoning in the present and future.
Curated by Amy L. Powell, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, with research assistance from curatorial interns Sheenjini Ghosh and Brooke Zhang.
Made possible through the Krannert Art Museum Initiatives Fund, the J. Fred and Donna Giertz Exhibition Support Fund, the James and Beth Armsey Fund for the Support of the Krannert Art Museum and the Krannert Center for the Performing Arts, the James W. Armsey and Beth L. Armsey Fund for the Support of the Library and the Krannert Art Museum, Campus Arts Research in the Office for Arts Integration, the Frances P. Rohlen Fund, and the School of Art & Design Visitor Series.
