My meaning is specific: it is about black people who could fly. That was part of the folklore of my life; flying was one of our gifts . . . Perhaps it was wishful thinking—escape, death, and all that. But suppose it wasn’t. What might it mean? I tried to find out . . .
—Toni Morrison in conversation with LeClair, T. (1994)
Bodies in motion form the propulsive core of Steffani Jemison’s practice, which she describes as a melding of kinetic and literary disciplines into works of density and unbearable lightness. “Bound,” her second exhibition at Greene Naftali, draws on motifs of the limitless sky and the broader impulse to take to the air, extending her interest in legacies of dispersal and fugitivity in Black cultural traditions. Jemison’s work across media has long been concerned with the weight of both physical and social forces, but here defying the gravitational pull is consonant with surrendering to it, envisioning new possibilities for liberation in both suspension and descent.
Perhaps best-known for her hypnotic video portrayals of highly skilled performers, Jemison considers the physical exploits of Chicago-based tumblers who twist, leap, and vault themselves into the air in her latest moving image work. The film lingers on their suspension, often cutting to images of a vast sky overlayed with the distorted logo of the country’s largest trampoline company, SkyBound, wading in its contradictory intimations and lexical possibilities. Narrations from two tumblers envisioning the experience of flying and a feverish, improvised soundtrack by drummer Brandon “Buz” Donald, embody the kind of heedless freedom suggested by flight, enunciated by the lush strokes of the night sky from a found theatrical backdrop against which the film is framed.
The bodily transgressions performed by the film’s tumblers are further distilled by pipe-and-fitting sculptures that resemble a jungle gym. Hinged to the sculptures and situated across the gallery are drawings on mirrored glass that evoke Jemison’s own archives and art historical references, including canonical sources inspired by the myth of Icarus. Here, the story of Icarus, which begins with an incarcerated father and son, dovetails with a wider meditation on an experience of transgression, or as Jemison has argued, “to the tantalizing possibility of escape, individual and collective.” In Jemison’s retelling, the fall of Icarus is interpreted not only through the lens of failure, but also freedom: “The knowledge that sweet release, albeit temporary, feels worth almost any risk.”
at Greene Naftali, New York
until March 9, 2024