Persona Non Granted by Will Rawls

Saturday 04/14/18 5PM

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Screenings · Exhibition-Related

Persona Non Granted by Will Rawls

Cover Image:

Drawing by Anna Craycroft with doodles by Will Rawls. Courtesy the artists

As part of Anna Craycroft’s exhibition and residency “Motion into Being,” presented during the Department of Education and Public Engagement’s Spring 2018 R&D Season: ANIMATION, artist Will Rawls will screen three films made using Craycroft’s installation and animation apparatus. In Persona Non Granted, Rawls draws parallels between the laborious construction of stop-motion images and the choreographic work of animating bodies by juxtaposing video documentation of the filmmaking process with completed animation sequences of his choreography. Each film— The Party, Sister Spell, and Alpha Dance (all 2018)—stages performances of black collectivity through a series of fleeting portraits and imaginary worlds. As the dancers wait to be captured on camera, the social life of rehearsal points to the “persona non granted”—a liveness that escapes between frames. The screening will be followed by a conversation between Craycroft and Rawls on the process of developing his new work, framed in part by Craycroft’s inquiry into stop-motion technology and their shared interests in storytelling, choreography, and the relationship between dance and animation.

Will Rawls is a choreographer, writer, and performer. His practice engages relationships between language, image, architecture, sound, and dance to formulate non-disciplinary questions regarding humanity and social inscription. He frames the dancer within the racialized codes of art space, where systems of technique and power collide and can be critically unraveled by the personal. Rawls has shown work at Portland Institute of Contemporary Art (2017), ImPulsTanz (2016), MoMA P.S.1 (2016), Danspace Project (2016, 2015, 2012), Performa 15 (2015), and the Chocolate Factory (2013). His writing has been published by Artforum, Triple Canopy, les presses du réel, the Museum of Modern Art, the Hammer Museum, and Danspace Project. He is recipient of a 2017–18 Guggenheim Fellowship, a 2017 Robert Rauschenberg Foundation Residency, the Casinos Austria 2016 Prix Jardin d’Europe, and a 2015 Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grant.

Anna Craycroft was born in Oregon in 1975 and raised in New York. She has had solo shows at Ben Maltz Gallery, Los Angeles (2017); Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, Portland, OR (2013); the Blanton Museum of Art, Austin (2010); Tracy Williams Ltd., New York (2008, 2009, 2011); and Le Case D’Arte, Milan (2005). She has had two-person exhibitions at Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona (2015); REDCAT, Los Angeles (2014); and Sandroni Rey, Los Angeles (2007). Craycroft recently debuted a major new work, The Earth Is a Magnet, commissioned for the ICA Boston exhibition “The Artist’s Museum” (2016). Other notable group exhibitions include “Champs Elysees” at Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2013), and MoMA P.S.1’s “Greater New York” (2005). She has received commissions for public sculpture from Socrates Sculpture Park (2004), the Lower Manhattan Cultural Center (2005), and Art in General (2006), New York, and from Den Haag Sculptuur, The Hague (2008).