thick wake
home | about | works | cv | contact Various video loops merge and segregate overhead. The video transitions, created and designed with video artist Matthew Deinhart, are activated by a live feed camera, detecting when someone is watching and continuing the theme present in her body of work, of performer visibility and relationship to audience. While Cuyjet imagines the full scope of the project and installation, THICK WAKE is in progress.
“In the 1950s, film star and Oscar nominee Dorthy Dandridge dipped her toe in a pool after being told that facility in the hotel she was performing in was not available to her because she was black. Due to the rebellion of her toe, the pool was emptied and refilled. I think about my own contamination, real and imagined. And about the alchemy of water and its relationship to the body; the transference that occurs when we are submerged and surrounded despite our consciousness of it. I imagined this image, a dark-bodied swimmer in a perpetual stroke viewed from underneath, for a long time. Not knowing exactly why other than “needing to,” I am grateful to LMCC and Black Gotham Experience for supplying the space and resources to find it. This installation (an ambition that is limited here to the technology of projection and video), is a marker on the map of a larger journey, demonstrates the current state of my process and reconsiders the past as presence: past dances, a collective history, the remnants after a disturbance... It folds former ideas into new iterations. I appreciate you stopping by to offer your eyes. If you are watching, then you too are contaminated. What to do in this wake?”
duration: 20:00
as part of LMCC’s 2024 River to River Festival
Black Gotham Experiance
exhibiting June 20 - 22, 8:30 - 10pm
Thank you to Matthew, Kamau, Shana and everyone at LMCC. Thank you Rich and Jessie.
installation images by by LMCC film stills by Richard Martin
© 2025 Leslie Cuyjet