KEIOUI KEIJAUN THOMAS – MY LAST AMERICAN DOLLAR
6pm
SPACE Artist-in-Resident, Keioui Keijaun Thomas, presents a special in-progress showing of My Last American Dollar on Friday, June 21 at 6pm.
From Keioui Keijaun:
“In my project “My Last American Dollar: Round 1. Tricking and Flipping Coins: Making Dollars Hit, Round 2. Black Angels in the Infield: Dripping Faggot Sweat, Round 3. Whatchu Gonna Do: Marvelous like Marva” I am thinking about resistance. How do we resist temptation, how do we slow down, how do we play, how do we survive?
I have been thinking about 5 spaces / environments that frame my research: Locker Rooms, Strip Clubs, Waiting Rooms, Church pews and Field Days.
In “My last American Dollar” I build a “waiting room” inside of a room. Church pews and benches become spaces for audience members to watch me and themselves. Sometimes I am her, I am your dancer. My back sweat is your holy water in our locker room. My speech becomes locker room talk, the “boys” playing in the field.
The project investigates forms in which black and brown people hold space for each other, how do you carry the multiplicities of being young, gifted and black.”
THE POETICS OF TRESPASSING Keioui Keijaun Thomas from Pacitti Company on Vimeo.
Keioui Keijaun Thomas creates live performance and multimedia installations that oscillate between movement and materials that function as tools, objects and structures, as well as a visual language that can be read, observed, and repeated within spatial, temporal, and sensorial environments. Her work investigates the histories, symbols, and images that construct notions of Black identity within black personhood. Thomas examines, deconstructs, and reconstructs notions of visibility, hyper-visibility, passing, trespassing, eroticized, and marginalized representations of the black body in relation to disposable labor, domestic service, and notions of thingness amongst materials addressing blackness outside of a codependent, binary structure of existence. Thomas earned their Masters degree from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Thomas has shown work nationally and internationally in Los Angeles, CA; Portland, OR; Chicago, IL; Boston, MA; New York, NY; Miami, FL; and Taipei, Taiwan; Paris, France; Mexico City, Mexico; Santiago, Chile; Saskatchewan and Vancouver, Canada and the United Kingdom.