Sur Rodney (Sur)
How does one arrive at creating an abstraction as evidence of what hybridization and miscegenation can look like? Landscape: Western Hemisphere, an 18-minute single-channel video created in 2010/11, does just that. The projection begins and ends with a microscopic view into an anatomical landscape of the artist’s head hair. Ideally, it is projected as a floor-to-ceiling moving image on one wall in a blacked-out space. The projection is an illustration of our history in producing the Western Hemisphere, evidenced in the texture that grows from the roots of her head-hair — a mixing of bloodlines revealed in the texture, a creation of our miscegenated Western Hemisphere.
natures: a guerilla girl story. Andil Gosine.
Andil Gosine would meet Lorraine O’Grady at the opening of the 2010 exhibition What’s Left, at the Alexander Gray gallery. Therein began their forever friendship, understandable, as both have roots in the Caribbean diaspora and take an archaeological, archival and historicist approach to their work. Work on Landscape began shortly thereafter.
My role in the creation of Landscape: Western Hemisphere was to locate the team and equipment necessary to produce the concept. First, we had to consider what the natural environment of our Western Hemisphere sounds like. I was instructed to stand outside by a river park, at the crack of dawn in sub-zero weather, with a zoom recorder to capture the sounds of birds awakening while the city roadways rumble softly in the background, redundant, and the city comes alive.
This scenario happened over days, in different locations, along the riverfront. The recorded sound became a background to the projected visuals of the artist’s hair being blown with hand-held motorized fans. Strands of hair sway, quiver, rustle and twist in every and all directions as if in orgasmic glory. The effect was created using a feature on a high-end still camera that would only allow us to shoot in short segments. The captured images selected were edited from over an hour of moving hair strands we recorded. Images were sometimes inverted, fully surrendering all possibilities to create something beautiful. Something layered in sound and image.
The making of Andil Gosine’s video, natures: a guerilla girl story, employs recorded audio culled from a conversation with Lorraine which took place on June 21, 2010, and informed the making of Landscape as an initial step in the process. The diptych’s story is remarked on in Andil’s video, highlighted in a text that reads, “I asked Lorraine O’Grady about her photographic diptych The Clearing: or Cortez and La Malinche, Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, N. and Me .”[1]The left panel of the photographic diptych pictures a nude interracial heterosexual couple engaged in reclined coupling, floating above a boy and girl in an outdoor park running towards a pile of clothes and a gun while chasing a ball. The right panel pictures the same couple lying in the same field, absent of children. The Black woman lies on her back staring off in the distance while the white male dressed in chainmail, his head now a skull, lies beside her admiring what appears to be a mortal post-coital state.
Andil’s video natures: a guerilla girl story, presents a diptych video of an interracial male couple framed shoulder-to-head. They are pictured on a screen to the left, in a white ceramic tiled room, playfully wrestling on a bed while kissing. On the screen pictured right, the couple engages in silent discussion, interrupted by a blank screen before a more silent conversation that leads to more kissing and ends with active positioning. We hear Lorraine speak of love and sex and how to untangle a very complicated relationship they have with each other. Her voice rescued from one of the many recorded conversations she’s had with Andil, a sequel to a much larger conversation, exploring and reviewing their overlapping interests recorded in conversations when meeting in person and continued in collected emails sent at odd hours that catalogue their conversations.
Reflecting on themes of nature, love, sex, hybridization, and miscegenation, Lorraine’s video Landscape is an expression of what these can look like while Andil’s natures is an expression of what they can feel like. Certainly, this is an easier discussion for a Black heterosexual woman with Caribbean roots to have in consort with a same-gender loving man from the Caribbean — fertile ground for feminist and queer politics to more comfortably come in.
[1] Right after we hear Andil ask Lorraine “What is love?” referring to her 1992 photographic diptych The Clearing.
