Steffani Jemison: A Rock, A River, A Street

May 11, 2023
7:30pm doors
8:00pm event

$15 ticket 

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Rotations, Poetic Research Bureau, and Primary Information present

A Rock, A River, A Street, with Steffani Jemison

Screening, Reading, & Conversation with Taylor Renee Aldridge

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In her experimental debut novella, A Rock, A River, A Street, published by Primary Information in 2022, artist Steffani Jemison moves deftly across narrative genres and styles as she interrogates the boundedness of the self, the possibilities of plurality, and the limits of performance. Titled after Maya Angelou’s poem “On the Pulse of Morning,” the book is punctuated by gestural drawings that point to questions of repetition and difference.

2220 Arts+Archives residents Rotations and Poetic Research Bureau are excited to welcome Jemison to Los Angeles for a launch event co-organized with Primary Information. A reading by the artist will precede the screening of Jemison’s Similitude (2019, 35 mins.), alongside S. Pearl Sharp’s short, 1984 visual poem, Back Inside Herself, and Yvonne Rainer’s silent Volleyball (Foot Film), part of the artist’s late-1960s series of alert dance works. To be followed by a conversation with Jemison and California African American Museum (CAAM) visual arts curator, Taylor Renee Aldridge.

Similitude explores modernist mime, postcolonial mimicry, gesture and abstraction in relation to American and European mid-20th-century modernist mime. Featuring a black American actor trained in physical theater, Similitude considers spiritual dimensions of the discipline, including questions of masking and opacity, self-sufficiency and self-similarity, and the structural device of the parable or similitude. 

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Courtesy Annet Gelink Gallery, Cinenova, and Video Data Bank.

More information: rotations-la.net.