Souci de Soi: AUDREY JOHNSON (2017)

BODY / MEMORY

Performance, choreographic score, photographic stills

Duration: 9 weeks 

Souci de soi: AUDREY JOHNSON is a collaboration between choreographer Biba Bell and dancer Audrey Johnson for the Elaine L. Jacob Gallery. Each day the gallery is open Audrey performs 10 minutes of personal, subtle, and transformative actions, a two-fold offering for both herself and the public. Throughout the nine-week period of the exhibition, a choreographic score guides the movement practice. One image is captured each day during the performance, to be printed, installed, and left in her absence. Throughout the course of the exhibition the images accumulate, revealing a fragment-like trace of a daily dance practice, a repeated effort whose fullness is better felt than seen.

Nearing the end of his life, Michel Foucault turned his attention toward the ethics of care as it relates to practices of freedom, subjectivity, and what he discusses as “technologies of the self.” A space for daily meditation, reflection, and physicality, the practice of cultivating the aesthetics and art of the self might counter forces of subjection and produce a movement to off-set the harsh political climate of the day. Here, the dancer is offered as a figure exemplar who critically navigates the spectrum between discipline, self-care, and experimentation.

Included in the group exhibition In Pieces: Presence and Objecthood in the Aftermath of Technology at the Elaine L. Jacob Gallery (January 20 through March 24, 2017). Curated by Richard Haley

Re-Installed at Parapet Real Humans, St. Louis, by invitation of curator/artist Amy Granat: 36 images, the choreographic score and statement of the piece, and performance of an abbreviated version (20 minutes) of Johnson’s durational, gallery-set practice, a citational action but also a new element supplementing the piece's installation in the St. Louis space.

Parapet Real Humans: http://www.parapetrealhumans.com/artists/biba-bell-with-audrey-johnson