John Felix Arnold, Jessica Cook, Amari Jones, Leo Ryan, and the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill Wilson Special Collections Library

Beginning Thoughts and Proposal for Rhapsody Tentacular, curated by SiSi Chen for Tiger Strikes Asteroid Gallery, Brooklyn, NY 2024

Entrypoint to Outpouring (a series of actions which confront monument with fluidity in process)

Given that so many of the monuments occupying our shared landscapes are odes to figures of oppressive violence, patriarchy, capitalism, and terror in some way, what do we do within and toward their gaze? How do we imagine ways to deconstruct their impact physically, psychologically, and spiritually within ourselves, our communities, the systems we inhabit, and the landscapes we share? Where and how do we resist or shift the idea of “monument” and all that it represents as a tool of patriarchy and colonialism? How do we transform culture with knowledge, education, and history so as to cast an inescapable light on the aggrandized mythologies of denial and systemic oppression that give these monuments their power? How do we embody fluid, collective, and transformative responses to their intrusive, rigid, and cold presence? Might we re-imagine them in ways that uplift us rather than weighing on us? How can we connect with our own bodies in space and time so as to find layers of language in movement, exploring our personal narratives existing in motion so as to free ourselves in some way from their looming presence?

Each person in this arm of Rhapsody Tentacular was raised in the Southeastern United States. We embody different identities, positionalities, connections to and within the histories, lineages, and cultural intersections of the South. Within our fold are Black, Asian, white, queertrans, cisgender, non-binary, female, and male bodies who all share a belief in ideas of liberation, anti-racism, inter-connectedness, bodily autonomy, and love. We all grew up with the looming presence of unforgiving bronze and stone monuments to the white supremacist “lost cause” of the confederacy overwhelming our public spheres, intruding on our lives. The denial-ridden “lost cause” mythology, which is the foundation for their construction, is embedded in nearly every aspect of society that makes up this country*. The lifelong presence of these monuments, and their implications which reach into our daily lives, have impacted us in ways that we continue to unpack and resist.

As bodies who share a formative connection to the South, we have decided to create works which confront, consider, deconstruct, and re-imagine the very notion of monument through process-driven experiences involving research, movement, conversations, interaction, visualization, and representation. Focused on process rather than product, the work is a shift from effigies that, like the monuments in question, often fictionalize and deny history so as to erect rigid symbols that impose themselves on us. We find a generative connection with our own bodies, one another, and the spaces we move within. We inhabit movement, vulnerability, time in flux, ideas in expansion, subjugated knowledge, the archive, and collective understanding as positions of ascension, power, opening, and outpouring. We are creating a fractalized form of art making where each realization, interpretation, and conversation builds upon the last into a body of work that is the proliferation of bodies at work, at play, and in flux. We are becoming untethered to notions of doctrine or structures of denial with each passing moment. We are destroying and reforming, bearing witness andbeing witnessed, giving and receiving, moving and making, discovering and opening, surrendering and pushing, moving and being.

The works will be presented in three projects. Ryan, Jones, and Arnold are creating a project in North Carolina titled Within and Together, much of which is taking place on site at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Based in movement, video, and experimental drawing, the work stems from their reading choices, personal narratives, and collective experiences on sites like the former grounds of the Silent Sam monument**.

Simultaneously, Cook is creating movement-based work in Brooklyn. Titled “Dead Time” in a Social Body”, her movement work utilizes interplay with objects (some of which will be sculptural works created by Arnold in collaboration) and builds on her selection of readings, personal narrative, as well as the multi-disciplinary works from Ryan, Jones, and Arnold. Cook will explore the gallery space at intervals through the run of the exhibition.

The culmination of these projects will come together on March 16th at the gallery, with the works from Ryan, Jones, and Arnold being installed and presented in coordination with a public performance by Cook. The physical works from both projects will remain in the gallery for the duration of the exhibition.

This entire process has been informed by our connection to the Wilson Special Collections Library at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, its librarians, and larger community. Artist John Felix Arnold is a current recipient of the Wilson Library’s annual Incubator Award Program. This relationship has led to an idea to generate a series of texts which explore different connective causes and consequences of both the monuments in question and the systems of power that enable their presence, as well as stories of those who transcend them. With the help of the Wilson’s librarians, this body of readings and the ensuing conversations around them have become the entrypoint from which the projects of Entrypoint to Outpouring are being realized.

The third project, Source, Access, Movement, will consist of librarians from the Wilson Library conducting an information exchange with Tiger Strikes Asteroid as a conceptual work created by Nadia Clifton, Sarah Carrier, SiSi Chen, and John Felix Arnold. Instead of being tasked with fulfilling requests for information, the librarians involved will be sending materials and texts based on their own interests and research to the gallery to be printed, presented, and shared at T.S.A. with the gallery’s community. We are deeply grateful for the opportunity to work with the Wilson Library and everyone there who works painstakingly to steward this ever growing source of knowledge and inspiration that it is today.

*Adam Domby, “The False Cause”, p3-12. University of Virginia Press, 2020

**Adam Domby, “The False Cause”, p1, 19-21. University of Virginia Press, 2020