Claudia Hart’s RECUMULATIONS (2010–2019) is a video triptych presenting three avatars cast against ambiguous black and white backgrounds. Their movements are jittery and irrational; their bodies move beyond a binary reading of race and gender. Created in collaboration with performance artist Roberto Sifuentes, the project reinterprets Judson Dance Theatre co-founder Trisha Brown’s 1971 dance video ACCUMULATIONS. Its animated choreography gestures at a cyborg poetics of embodiment that overcomes a rational system of movement, merging material bodies and digital avatars in a haptic environment that rejects easy reads of corporeality and the real.
The basis for RECUMULATIONS is the experimental digital-dance animation created by Hart during her residency at the Ellen Stone Belic Center for the Study of Women and Gender in the Media and Arts in 2010, in collaboration with Roberto Sifuentes. The initial phase of the project was to re-perform and then interpret Brown's 1971 dance video ACCUMULATIONS. The performance was recorded in the motion capture lab of Columbia College for use as raw data for the creation of new animated choreography. Sifuentes' male and significantly gendered movements are being combined and recombined to form an irrational "rational" system of movement, inserted into a hybrid avatar digitally designed by Hart.
RECUMULATIONS IN PUBLIC AND PRIVATE COLLECTIONS
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; The Julie Walsh Collection; and the Collection of Scott Button.
RECUMULATIONS IN PAST EXHIBITIONS
2011, RECUMULATIONS, interior installation and site-specific performance-object, with Roberto Sifuentes, Black and White Project Space, Brooklyn, NY
2013, THERE'S A BODY ON THE SCREEN, Claudia Hart with music by Edmund Campion, Kurt Hentschlager, Yefeng Wang, Museum of Luxun Academy of Art, Shen Yang, China, curated by Hanna Yoo, May 21, 2013
2020, BEYOND EMBODIMENT, curated by Laura Darlington and Selwa Sweidan, Brand Library & Art Center, 25 January 2020 – 20 March 2020, Glendale, CA.
