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With works by Cameron A. Granger, Brett Kashmere, Elizabeth “Liz” Mputu, Akosua Adoma Owusu, Martine Syms, Abbey Williams and X-PRZ “Flip It & Reverse It” features a selection of video art from the mid 90s to the present day. The works sample footage and preexisting material from television, social media, and popular music to address how Blackness is constructed in mass media.
The exhibition borrows its title from the hook of Missy Elliott’s 2002 hit single, “Work It,” nodding to the exhibition’s use of humor and iconic moments in popular culture to propose avenues for Black self-determination.
Bookhard states, “From MTV’s genre-forming reality TV show, “The Real World,” to the viral coverage of professional athletes endorsing the Black Lives Matter movement, “Flip It & Reverse It” contends with the fraught economy of pre and post internet spectatorship. The exhibition also explores the racial biases present in emerging technologies and cyberspace. The artists subvert digital mechanisms like the Google Search algorithm and social media comment sections to reckon with the eminent stakes of being seen.”
Participating artists:
Cameron A. Granger is Sandra’s son & came up in Cleveland, Ohio. He likes pigeons, video games, & memes. Lately he’s been thinking about how myth making, and narrative have been used as a means to police the imagination. He’s a lifetime member of MINT Collective, long may it live, and an alumni of Euclid Public Schools.
Brett Kashmere is a filmmaker, curator, and writer living in Oakland, California. His creative and scholarly practice reframes dominant narratives about sports and illuminates new perspectives and histories. Kashmere’s films and videos have screened at the BFI London Film Festival, Milano Film Festival, Kassel Documentary Festival, Ann Arbor Film Festival, Museum of Contemporary Photography, UnionDocs, CROSSROADS, and the Wexner Center for the Arts. He is executive director of Canyon Cinema Foundation, founding editor of INCITE Journal of Experimental Media, and co-editor of Craig Baldwin: Avant to Live! Kashmere holds a PhD in film & digital media from the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Elizabeth “Liz” Mputu is a First Generation Congolese Floridian. Mputu is an artist, registered nurse and community advocate having served on DEI committees and as a citizen diplomat. Her work centers, “the practice of mobilizing video, interactive media, sculpture, and installation to examine questions of play, spirituality, and well/being within and beyond virtual space.” Her multimedia and multiplatform practice explores subjects such as digital citizenship and the intimate relationship between humans and technology; resistance efforts in preserving traditional Congolese spirituality and life principles in a post- colonial world; the freedom of self-authorship online in a capitalist society; challenging forced normativity in identity politics and explorations into taboo subcultures
Akosua Adoma Owusu is an award-winning filmmaker and educator exploring diasporic identity and collective memory through the lens of triple consciousness. Her films have screened at major festivals including Berlinale, Locarno, Toronto, IFFR, and the Venice Biennale, and are held in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art and Centre Pompidou. She is the recipient of the Africa Movie Academy Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Creative Capital Award. Owusu is founder of Obibini Pictures and currently serves as Assistant Professor of Film in the Department of Media, Journalism, and Film at Howard University.
Martine Syms obtained an MFA from Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson NY (2017) and a BFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago IL (2007). Syms has earned wide recognition for a practice that combines conceptual grit, humor and social commentary. Using a combination of video, installation and performance, often interwoven with explorations into technique and narrative, Syms examines representations of blackness and its relationship to vernacular, feminist thought, and radical traditions. Syms’s research-based practice frequently references and incorporates theoretical models concerning performed or imposed identities, the power of the gesture, and embedded assumptions concerning gender and racial inequalities. Courtesy of Video Data Bank, School of the Art Institute of Chicago
Abbey Williams is “a mom, a Libra, an amateur singer, an oversharer,” and an artist who mostly makes videos, living and working in her hometown of New York City. Her work has been exhibited at TATE Britain, London, UK; National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia; Reina Sofia Museum, Madrid, Spain; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; and The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY. Williams was a part of the 2005 Greater New York exhibition at MoMA PS1. Williams holds a BFA from the Cooper Union, an MFA from Bard College, and was a participant at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Her work has been written about in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Flash Art, Hyperallergic, and Artforum.
X-PRZ was a biracial “art band” of four artists — Tony Cokes, Doug Anderson, Kenseth Armstead, and Mark Pierson — working in installation, photography, painting, sculpture, and video. Existing from 1991 – 2000, the group was dedicated to the production of engaging, hybridized, and humorous cultural actions. X-PRZ exhibited works internationally, including at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; 7th Berlin Videofest, Germany; Alternative Museum, New York; National Civil Rights Museum, Memphis; Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago; 14th World Wide Video Festival, The Hague, The Netherlands; and Armand Hammer Museum at UCLA, Los Angeles. Courtesy of Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), New York
Storm Bria-Rose Bookhard is a writer and curator based in Los Angeles. Her practice centers how artists of color and other marginalized practitioners are inscribed within art history and visual culture. She has conducted research for the Getty Research Institute’s (GRI) Expanding the Study of Performance in Women Artists’ Archives initiative and in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s Marjorie and Leonard Vernon Collection. Her curatorial projects have traversed immersive performance art, diasporic legacies of craft, and time-based media.
Storm has held positions across the arts sector including roles at the Getty Research Institute, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, David Zwirner, and Regen Projects. She is an alumna of the Yale Norfolk School of Art, the LACMA Mellon Summer Academy, and was awarded the Farber Fund for Student Excellence by the University of Southern California. Her research has been supported by the Mellon Foundation and her writing has been published by the Archives of Women Artists, Research, and Exhibitions (AWARE), the Boston Art Review, and Harvard University Press.
Storm holds a BFA in Fine Art and MA in Curatorial Practices and the Public Sphere from the University of Southern California.
VisArts’ Emerging Curator Program pairs an emerging curator with an experienced mentoring curator to produce new exhibitions and related programming.
Generous funding for this exhibition has been provided by
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