THE SOURCE MATERIAL IS NOT ENTIRELY ACCESSIBLE, WHICH IS PARTLY THE POINT
[DANCE]
SOLO BURNING A main reason people are drawn to works of art is the chance to see themselves reflected in them. So it was for dancer/ choreographer Jasmine Hearn, whose blue, sable, and burning took inspiration from a few other artists’ works. Fueling Hearn’s spirit and imagination was poet Robin Coste Lewis’ triptych poetry collection Voyage of the Sable Venus, as well as imagery from Hearn’s own ongoing collaboration with local visual artist and activist Jennifer Meridian. Hearn says she was particularly struck by the title poem in Lewis’ book, a narrative made up entirely of titles of artworks from ancient times to the present that speak to the black female figure in Western art. In that poem, Hearn says, Lewis was “mapping out this kind of body, this kind of vessel where a spirit can live.” With blue, sable, and burning, Hearn feels she has conjured a similar character, and by embodying this character she is mapping yet another journey. She performs the new solo work Jan. 26, in the gym of The Braddock Carnegie Library. Hearn calls blue, sable, and burning “a deeply rooted investigation and conversation with myself from a place of darkness and deep feeling,” says Hearn. With the work, the Houston native and Point Park grad says she is inviting others to witness this cathartic conversation. The 40-minute piece, funded by The Pittsburgh Foundation, grew out of Hearn’s solo work CINDER, which was made while she was an artist-in-residence at Dance Source Houston’s The BARN. It has been developed in residencies at Pearlann Porter’s The Space Upstairs, in Point Breeze, and at New York’s Movement Research through a 2016 Van Lier Fellowship. Set to a mostly original recorded soundscape created by Hearn and Pittsburgh’s slowdanger, blue, sable, and burning is a mix of dance, theatrical monologue, personal narrative and song, all performed live by Hearn. And like Lewis’ poem, which in part seeks to reclaim negative connotations of the Sable Venus as a symbol of the rape of slave women, Hearn seeks with this solo work to reclaim painful symbols from her own life’s journey. INFO@PGHCITYPAPER.COM
JASMINE HEARN performs BLUE, SABLE AND BURNING 7:30 p.m. Thu., Jan. 26. Braddock Carnegie Library, 419 Library St., Braddock. $12 at the door (free for Braddock Carnegie Library patrons). 412-351-5356 or www.facebook.com (“blue sable and burning”) NEWS
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Jasmine Hearn in blue, sable and burning {PHOTO COURTESY OF SCOTT SHAW}
{BY STEVE SUCATO}
“Third Floor West gallery 500 Sampsonia Way,” a room-sized installation by Stephen Bram
[ART REVIEW]
SPACED OUT {BY NADINE WASSERMAN}
N THE DARKENED space of the basement gallery at the Mattress Factory, the sounds of the MTA subway are instantly recognizable. Depending on when you enter, the images might be fairly still, with only people in motion, or an abstract blur of light and sound. “Stations,” a multichannel video, plays on 10 screens — five on one long wall and five on the opposite. Edited by Ezra Masch from simultaneous footage shot by riders with their own cell phones from 10 different windows on the train, the installation makes one feel like a passenger on a subterranean ride (albeit sans rats, bad smells and subway “showtime” dancers). The 10 screens of “Stations” are laid out based on the distance between train windows. At first glance, what seems like a single take slowly reveals itself as an amalgam of separate images. The installation, part of the museum’s Factory Installed series, is a study in both abstraction and realism. Much like a cubist or futurist painting,
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multiple images are here synchronized into a parallax view that depends not only on the position of the observer/recorder but on that of the observer/viewer. The complexity is further enhanced by the fact that the image both speeds by as an abstraction and then slows to reveal figuration and realism as the train comes to a stop, people enter or exit, and station signs along the No. 6 line become visible — Canal, Spring, Bleecker and Astor.
FACTORY INSTALLED continues through May 28. Mattress Factory, 500 Sampsonia Way, North Side. 412-231-3169 or www.mattress.org
The dysynchrony of group perception is here reconfigured to form a concert of light and sound formulated by both digital and mechanical technology. It gives one pause to contemplate this particular juncture, when our technological evolution has us
increasingly dependent on both physical and virtual tools. Similar thoughts are conjured when looking at the work of Christopher Meerdo, titled “Active Denial System.” In our current digital milieu, when it takes no time at all for an image to travel the globe, Meerdo ponders the ethical issues surrounding image sharing, consumption, manipulation and hacktivism. Like Masch, Meerdo explores a space between mechanical and digital, abstraction and figuration. Five contorted abstract “figures” populate his installation. Low to the ground and oddly shaped and colored, they resemble the fanciful abstractions of Franz West. Yet the source material is quite different and far more ideological, serious and not entirely accessible, which is partly the point. Meerdo extracts non-specific digital data from police body-cam pursuit videos and global protests, then uses an algorithm to turn shapes and ghost images into CONTINUES ON PG. 26
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