Using the techniques and technologies associated with photography, cinema, and the stage, Rawls’ [siccer] challenges divisions between the living, the captured, the rehearsed, and the performed.  Experimenting with stop-motion animation, the work features a compilation of still images that have been stitched together to produce moving images depicting a cast of Black dancers in various states of movement. These stop-motion videos are then projected onto chroma green frames suspended from the ceiling, reminiscent of the green screens commonly associated with film production. At once caught, distilled, fragmented, and unfinished, gestures glitch in and out of focus across Rawls’ cinematic scaffolding, which both literally and metaphorically speaks to the complex visibility of Blackness in contemporary society.

The project’s title is inspired by the Latin adverb “[sic],” used to indicate incorrect spelling within a quotation, and often employed when Black vernacular speech is cited within a standard English text. Through this titular reference, [siccer] illuminates the ways in which Black performance evades white and Western forms of “correction” and classification, suggesting instead a way of being that is both iterative and endlessly becoming, much like the project itself. Within the work, as language and gestures mutate, so too does meaning, in the process revealing meaning itself as yet another construction—as that which both becomes and comes undone. In an image-saturated world wherein our technologies and identities are inextricably intertwined, [siccer] invites audiences to consider the verbal and physical play that marks how Black performance actively eludes capture and speculates on the potential for collective strategies of narrating the world, uncorrected.

Co-presented by Performance Space New York and L’Alliance New York’s Crossing The Line Festival, the live performances of [siccer] accompany the artist’s exhibition at The Kitchen, a book published by Wendy’s Subway, and an album published by the artist.

Find more information on The Kitchen’s website here!