Double Quadruple Etcetera Etcetera

source: dailyserving

Sondra Perry’s mirrored videos Double Quadruple Etcetera Etcetera I and II (2013) open the exhibition, featuring dancers whose movements have been accelerated to a maniacal speed. Employing the “content aware” tool frame-by-frame, Perry has erased the dancers’ bodies, resulting in two frenzied forms covered by the white walls that surround them. Only their hair remains exposed—a blatant racial signifier that cannot be disguised. For the curators, Perry’s piece introduces a theme that is crucial to the exhibition as a whole, alluding to Frantz Fanon’s notion in “The Lived Experience of the Black Man.” In this chapter from Black Skin, White Masks (1952), Fanon describes living in a world that does not see him, but only sees his body. For a black man in a postcolonial society, subjectivity is produced out of institutionalized racism. Fanon remains “always a Negro, never a man”—a madness-inducing, inescapable reality that confines him within his own appearance. For Perry, however, the piece was about creating “paraspaces,” a term that comes from science fiction to describe realms parallel to our own. While compelling, the idea of a “paraspace” connects only tenuously to the curatorial framework of disguise.
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source: sondraperry

Digital animations of dancers moving through the studio, the body is then covered using the content aware function in photoshop. Performed by Danny Giles and Joiri Minaya.
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source: vimeo

Sondra Perry makes performance, video installations, and works for the internet. They’ve participated in residencies at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Vermont Studio Center, Ox-bow, and the Experimental Television Center.
They’ve performed at The Artist’s Institute and Pioneer Works in NYC and have exhibited at the Seattle Art Museum and the Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts (MoCADA). Perry received their BFA from the New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University in 2012 and their MFA in 2015 from Columbia University, New York City’s 12th largest employer and number one cause of gentrification in the neighborhood of Harlem, New York.