Kerry Downey speaks with Sarada Rauch
This year the New Media Artspace presents two solo exhibitions by Sarada Rauch and Kerry Downey that both address political consciousness as craftwork. In conjunction with Downey’s exhibition, Rauch interviews Downey as the second part of a two-way dialogue between the artists on their works in relation to these and more ideas.
Sarada Rauch: How do you communicate who you are in this collection of work?
Kerry Downey: How is one of my favorite questions. It implies process and praxis. I communicate myself through senses, through material experimentation and play. I am building a language that is kinesthetic, visceral, phenomenological - it draws on and builds embodied knowledge. It’s a tuning-in process, one that negotiates a relationship between internal and external stimuli, between my unconscious and conscious mind, and between myself and others. I often don’t know what I’m saying, or what I want to say until I’m knee deep in the process.
This requires a good amount of self-reflection, but I have to be careful not to let certain forms of criticality and judgment shut down my intuition or play. So who I am is always changing. The self is not static, I’m engaging in acts of transformation, of learning and unlearning. I am deeply invested in how an artwork makes and unmakes you as a person. This also involves an eye towards power and agency, and I need others to help me see what I’m making, to bring awareness to my blind spots, and to learn what something I’ve done could mean to/for others.
SR: In your work, you mine your own life for content and subject matter. This operation is intimate, and at the same time, it requires a distance. Can you speak to using one's own narrative, its potential fog, challenges and rewards? What agency is gained or lost?
KD: I don’t take myself too seriously. I take myself very seriously.
Both are true and necessary and I try not to get stuck in one or the other - it’s all about how to move between these two positions. My own narrative is always somewhat oblique - I can and cannot see myself. I am coming in and out of focus, getting close and backing up, getting perspective then losing sight of what I’m doing or even who I am. And after the art work is completed, I have to deal with the audience - how overexposed or invisibilized do I feel? Talk about reenactment! Artists are in reenactments with their audiences all the time.
Working with one’s own life can be empowering, but it can also feel highly vulnerable and painful. There is always the danger of wallowing in your own confusion. We can get lost in ourselves. I think it’s important to not lose a sense of relationality to others' experiences of us and our work. There have been times when I’m really shocked at how anxious I feel after sharing autobiographical work. I can’t always predict which contexts will feel supportive. Part of the work of making art about oneself is to learn to separate yourself from the work - to let it go, to allow it to have a life of its own. Otherwise, we do lose agency and give our power over to others. We have to develop strong egos to be able to receive feedback and then get back to work.
SR: Artists like Anna Deavere Smith and Dread Scott have long employed the tool of reenactment to create space for multiplicity and perspectives outside of the dominant historical narrative. What conversations do you have with artists like these in your studio while you are making the work? What is your own relationship to the histories you are touching upon?
KD: I work with legacies of queer and feminist performance and the ways our personal, psychosomatic patterns and our political realities are always co-producing each other. I’m inspired by the ways Anna Deavere Smith, Dread Scott, and many more artists use reenactment as a tool for political address, as a tool to destabilize or problematize the ways history is told by “victors,” and to give voice to those who have been violently erased. Each artistic reenactment is a unique performance with its own vocabulary to be witnessed and unpacked. Reenactment can lay bare suppressed or conveniently forgotten historical facts, but is also a process of bringing forth an emotional granularity. I’m considering how our social relations both intentionally and unconsciously repeat through white supremacy as culture. Reenactment is a place where political and personal are entangled.
I use performance vocabularies of improvisation, gesture, mimicry, repetition, speech acts, diaristic poetics, absurdity, labor, collecting, ephemera/lity, and site to name a few! There isn’t a singular event or history I’m reperforming, rather I’m using these vocabularies to make visible and explore both intergenerational trauma and my own personal life patterns on both micro and macro levels, a lot of which is about relationality, interpersonal dynamics. I try to activate a huge range of physical movements in my art practice to support or change certain patterned ways of being. If repetition-compulsion is a trauma-reenactment, how can we use the vocabularies of repetition in performance to do a kind of necessary integrative work - an intentional theater or staging in order to invite another kind of awareness or critical distance to the pattern. Or to your point about creating space for multiple perspectives, performative strategies in art allow us to iterate possibilities. Queer camp works like this by playing with the performativity of gender. My use of the overhead projector re-enacts the performativity of didactics to explore how the teacher/professor imparts knowledge through performances of power or desire.
In this exhibition, Wormholes, Nothing but net, and A Third Space are all dealing with personal histories and relationships - not only between myself (as a white, genderqueer) and intimate others (friends, lovers, artists, imagined “others”) but also to the physical world (the environment, site, materials). These relations often explore power, labor, desire, fantasy (queer and feminist studies, psychoanalysis, postcolonialism, vital materialism). But rarely are these histories as explicit as the histories of What we came to see.
What we came to see is a work that has layers of reenactments. There are my friend Elizabeth’s re-enactments of visiting the Spomenik, which are re-enactments of millions of locals and tourists, and the monuments themselves are re-enactments - tributes to conflicting histories of war, violence, and form that appropriate brutalist architecture or sculpture. Then there is my attempt to near Elizabeth’s experience by exploring her documentation. I zoom in on her photos, pixelate, an attempt to near or approximate an experience that Elizabeth is naming as very politically, culturally, and phenomenologically site-specific. I can’t near their experience of these sculptures. I can only listen, study, read, and translate. I try to gain a historical understanding and consider how I am implicated in American imperialism and the rise of fascism. The act of the tourist re-photographing the monument is highly performative, but functions more like a cultural repetition compulsion of clickbait. So this video thinks about how a queer and feminist phenomenology takes a more critically ambivalent view - using abstraction to amplify questions about power and access.
SR: What changes when these standalone pieces are shown as a collection? How, if at all, do they shift and change when combined together?
KD: Lately I’ve been exploring the prefix trans - as it relates to trans identity, to experiences of transition and transformation, but also a way of thinking across or beyond. As a transdisciplinary artist who works across and beyond specific mediums, I want viewers to do the same - to look across, between, and beyond one work to a series of works or mediums. I don’t get to say what meaning an audience makes of this kind of engagement with my work, but I hope something gets illuminated about the radicality of creativity as a strategy for individual and collective agency and power. This is an open invitation for others to consider the relationship between experiences of their bodies and political consciousness.
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