Five projectors deconstructed and reassembled as a unified machine project synchronously a single piece 16mm film, creating a vertical collage of moving images. The images are constructed in a way that evoke the exquisite corpse game, revealing the body in five sections: the head, the torso, the waist, the legs, and the feet.Five dancers working in collaboration with choreographer Lydia Chrisman stand, walk, run, turn and bend. Each body occupies one of the five screens, together creating a new composite dancing body, a sum of the parts. The images interact and combine in surprising, playful and irrational ways, challenging the viewer’s conception of what the body is and how it moves as a whole. Andre Breton wrote about the exquisite corpse as a way of breaking apart the expected notions of a structure and working together to create a new amalgam of images that could not be the result of any single participant, but rather of the combination of the group. While the syntax of the piece is dictated by the linear mechanics of the sculpture - the piece of film, like time, travels only forward - the resulting images are nonlinear, made up of disparate parts. The piece is an open system with the tactile whirling of film and the sound of the projectors turning, which spin in tandem with the bodies on the screen.
Featuring Stacy Grossfield, Paul Hamilton, Anaïs Maviel, Antonio Ramos and Sarah White-Ayón.
