Gesture Archive
Human Resources, Los Angeles, CA, October 2013
Gesture Archive is a collection of 80 video portraits that illuminate, abstract, and re-assemble everyday gestures, movements, reflexes and poses that compose our physical vocabularies. While individually representative of their subjects, collectively these function as a panorama of contemporary human motion. Each video moves through a spectrum of embodied consciousness: revealing conscious movements including waving, high-fiving, air-quoting, scrolling, clicking; semi-conscious movements including scratching, knuckle-cracking, sighing, shrugging, squinting, remembering; and unconscious movements captured through close-up footage of each subject's tongue as they attempt to hold it perfectly still. The tongue, if you are alive, is always in motion. No footage is repeated, sped-up or reversed.
Subjects: I selected 20 video portraits to include in the exhibition, BASE: Session 1. None of the subjects featured are trained dancers. They are writers, performance artists, photographers, anthropologists, designers, architects, directors, actors and musicians who all incorporate the human body as a central theme, medium, instrument, or subject in their own work. The exhibited subjects are: Joe Heffernon, Nick Guanini, Richard Aldrich , Hannah Hunt, Graham Burnett, Eugene Kotlyerenko , Rachel Rose, Ian Cheng, Drew Broderick, Asger Carlson, Celia Hollander, Michael Fujikawa, Mikaela Bradbury, Willa Nasatir, Cally Robertson, Rachel Garrard, Elizabeth Yeager, Abe Abraham, Suzanne Weil, Hunter Hunt Hendrix.
Audio: The rock tumblers will run continuously for the duration of the show, providing analogue white-noise while polishing everyday objects. Their contents include rocks, iPhones, pens, phone-chargers, sand, batteries, salt, exacto-blades, thumb-drives, earbuds, seeds, shells, coins, flowers, and keys. The contents will be presented on October 13th, at the exhibition's closing reception.
Bio: Madeline Hollander is an artist and dancer who choreographs films to move the viewer into the frame of the composition and explores ways of extending choreography beyond the realms of dance and the human form. Her work aims to foreground the peripheries of everyday life and destabilize delineations between dancer/choreographer, performer/audience, and artworks/venues. She has performed and collaborated with choreographers, architects, and artists internationally and lives and works in New York City.
