ART CITIES:Paris, Ja’Tovia-Gary

Ja’Tovia M. Gary is an artist and filmmaker currently living and working in Brooklyn, New York. Gary’s work seeks to liberate the distorted histories through which Black life is often viewed while fleshing out a nuanced and multivalent Black interiority. Through documentary film and experimental video art, Gary charts the ways structures of power shape our perceptions around representation, race, gender, sexuality, and violence.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Galerie Frank Elbaz Archive

Ja’Tovia Gary’s solo exhibition “Tactile Cosmologies” is on presentation at Galerie Frank Elbaz in Paris. The title of the exhibition “Tactile Cosmologies”, was conceived by feminist thinker and historian Hortense Spillers. In the vein of deployments of sonicity and sonority that allow us to listen to images and afford subjects opportunities for self-fashioning, Ja’Tovia considers haptics as her modality for a coveillant self —and world— making that defiantly gazes out as it is (conscious of being) gazed upon. Her work embodies a closeness and quietude juxtaposed against the brutality of being forced to embody terror. Touch is an offering of care that forms the interstitial connective tissue that nurtures community and empathy, and refuses the scripted, controlling, and pathological toughness demanded of Black women’s lives and labor. The film collage “Giverny I (Négresse Impériale)” (2017) was shot on location in Claude Monet’s garden in Giverny, France. the work aims to examine the precarious nature of Black women’s bodily integrity, the ethics of care as resistance work, and how class position shapes the contours of violence. Set against the backdrop of the West’s continued global imperialist campaigns and its historical artistic canon, this experimental video features a mélange of HD video, archival footage, and analog animation to assert an oppositional gaze in the re-telling of modern history. Ja’Tovia Gary’s “An Ecstatic Experience” (2015) derives its title (and arguably its enraptured spur) from Kathleen Collins’s “Losing Ground” (1982). The work is the research interest of Collins’s philosophy professor protagonist Sara Rogers. Rogers works to conceive of ecstasy in ways more attendant to the artist’s practice than to the strict terms of Christian doctrines. She must also manage the new ecstatic experiences developing in her life. As she notes, “If ecstasy is an immediate apprehension of the divine then the divine is energy”. Now in postproduction “The Evidence of Things Not Seen” is a portrait of one woman’s effort to transcend the trauma of her history. Begun as a biographical film about her mother, the work expanded into an examination of Gary’s entire family lineage and, finally, a kind of personal essay. Gary interviews her parents, 80-year-old grandmother, siblings and former lovers to create “a composite portrait of myself”. And while the filmmaking process has been “therapeutic and uncomfortable and destabilizing, Gary is quick to note the is not intended as “a navel-gazing exercise” she says. “The film is centered around the idea of transgenerational trauma — trauma can be imprinted in the DNA of our ancestors and transmitted down the line. Are we trapped in these repeated intrinsic patterns or can we access transgenerational wisdom and free ourselves from them?”

Info: Galerie Frank Elbaz, 66 rue de Turenne, Paris, Duration: 2/2-23/3/19, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-19:00, www.galeriefrankelbaz.com

Giverny I (NÉGRESSE IMPÉRIALE) – excerpt 1 from Ja’Tovia Gary on Vimeo.

 

 

AN ECSTATIC EXPERIENCE Trailer (2015) from Ja’Tovia Gary on Vimeo.