About
Hands Performance, single channel 3D animated video with sound, total run time 5 minutes
Hands Performance takes its title from the well-known element of vogue fem, highlighting a dancer's ability to tell a story with their hands and showcasing their musicality. Hands Performance continues Rashaad's exploration of mapping Black cultural production as a form of movement research, data storage, and collective wayfinding. Working with a team of Black Queer ASL interpreters, various vogue fem performers, flex dancers, and motion capture technologists, Newsome translated his original poetry into a movement dataset exhibiting the uniquely Black and Queer aspects of sign language. Newsome then integrated this movement into Being the Digital Griot, a Non-binary Artificial Intelligence Newsome premiered in his exhibition Assembly at the Park Avenue Armory Drill Hall in February 2022. The film combines stunning visuals from a speculative future with a highly energetic score filled with booming bass, synthetic snares, snaps, claps, and glitchy computer sounds, resulting in a futuristic sonic experience. As Being performs, they move seamlessly between signing and dance, exhibiting uniquely Black and Queer kinesics that signal the immaterial expressivity inherent to Black American life.
Hands Performance is a co-commission from Somerset House Studios London and ArtCenter College of Design Pasadena, CA. The film will premiere June 7 - September 5, 2023, on Channel, Somerset House’s new curated online space for art, ideas, and the artistic process. Home to over 200 artists and creatives, including Somerset House Studios, Channel draws on Somerset House’s unique community to drive a distinctive and evolving program of original films, podcasts, talks, and curated content. On June 13th, Somerset House Studios will host an in-person screening and conversation with Rashaad and London based curator and writer Tamar Clarke-Brown, whose interdisciplinary work focuses on experimental futurisms, intimate choreographies, and diasporic practices. Tamar currently curates and produces commissions with Arts Technologies at the Serpentine Gallery.
September 16, 2023 – February 24, 2024, the film will be on view at ArtCenter College of Design's Peter & Merle Mullin Gallery. For this presentation, Newsome will also show three newly commissioned large-scale multimedia collage works that expand on the afro-cybernetic world and characters that show up in the film; these pieces merge 3D animation with collage resulting in an image-making process that exists in a queer space between collage, sculpture, painting, performance, and photography.
New and related collage works.
"The collage works in Hands Performance take inspiration from personal portraits, particularly those of Black Queer people in a state of togetherness or celebrating one's sexuality. I have thought about non-eurocentric art portraiture modalities. Can self-produced images of Black Queers mined from social media be source material for creating liberatory images that celebrate the Black Queer experience, which continues to be a source of fear in America? Visually, the figures in this work represent the connections between African Americans and the advancement of technology. When we came to America, we were not seen as human beings but as things of some sort, neither occupying the classic subject or object position. As a result, we occupied a peculiar space of "being," which has disturbing analogies to the queer space inhabited by robots. These works interrogate movements like cubism and reference its origins by including early to mid-century African masks and sculptures. The reclaiming and reimagining of these objects also signal older forms of technology. Historically, they were used as time machines, devices used in divination rituals to transport the user to another time or dimension to help people in crisis.
"These pieces take an innovative approach to image-making. That innovation lies in its interdisciplinary process and how it mirrors the concepts, histories, and lived experiences of the community and me that inform the images. They start as sculptures, as they are 3D models created in Maya, but then move into the realm of painting through UV mapping and 3D texture painting. I then employ photography through the 3D model and lighting process, thus allowing the works to have a photo "realist" quality. However, unlike an analog photographer, I am operating in the space of CGI, so nothing is impossible, granting me the agency to create surreal images." –Rashaad Newsome
RASHAAD NEWSOME STUDIO FILM PRODUCTION BREAKDOWN
Character design (Modeling, sculpting, texturing, shading, lighting).
Worldbuilding (Modeling, sculpting, texturing, shading, lighting).
Motion Capture: Director of Black Queer Artistic Sign Language, Vogue fem performer, flex/ bone breaker dancer.