The Air Connects Us (video still), 2018
GALLERY GUIDE
The Air Connects Us (video still), 2018
CURATORIAL STATEMENT Pauline Jennings: Becoming Human Pauline Jennings’ Becoming Human critiques the dichotomous relationship forming between human and wild in the Anthropocene era. In her three-channel video and sound installation, The Air Connects Us, the viewer follows two dancers as they navigate Shanghai, China’s bustling streets, urban forests and massive industrial sites in search of connections to wild. The Air Connects Us is Jennings’ first venture into filmmaking. Creating an immersive experience, the artist guides the viewer through choreographed movements and imagery that examines our evolving definition of “wilderness” in an ever-encroaching urban landscape.
“Only as we begin to notice and to experience, once again, our immersion in the invisible air do we start to recall what it is to be fully a part of this world.” — David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous In the film, Jennings and her partner Calvin Aham bend and suspend amidst the trees, or nudge and push in urgent physicality. Sometimes their movements mimic the surrounding architecture, while other moments they entwine as if rooting from the earth. While the central video features both figures, the left and right projections focus on the individual: Aham climbs within a tree as if in constant ascent, as Jennings moves along a stream bank descending into the earth. By closely focusing on the dancers, their movement, and the surrounding environment, the artist collapses the division between human and nature. Jennings questions what we are becoming as human beings, and how our relationship to the environment has evolved. Offering a sensuous experience, The Air Connects Us encourages us to reconsider our definition of wild in the modern world. — Heather Ferrell, Curator and Director of Exhibitions
BIOGRAPHY Based in Jericho, Vermont, Pauline Jennings is a contemporary choreographer and teacher. Her works for stage and installation have been presented at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Merce Cunningham Studio, Emergent Media and Performing Arts Center, International Symposium on Electronic Art (Dubai), and the Maker Festival (Shanghai). She has been a Visiting Artist for the Mills College Dance Department’s Repertory Dance Company and has lectured and taught master classes at the University of Applied Arts (Vienna), University of California at Berkeley, Amherst College, Dartmouth College, University of Maine, and University of New Mexico. Jennings holds an MFA in Dance Choreography and Performance from Mills College and currently teaches dance at Saint Michael’s College in Colchester. Pauline Jennings is the second artist to be featured as part of Project Vermont, a new series dedicated to experimentation by providing a setting for contemporary Vermont artists to push their artistic practice while creating new work.
RELATED PROGRAMMING
Artist Talk & Performance: Pauline Jennings Thursday, November 29, 2018, 6 – 7:30 p.m. Contois Auditorium, City Hall, 149 Church Street Pauline Jennings discusses her newest interdisciplinary project that ties together choreography, filmmaking, and sound design into a “dance for camera work.” Following her talk, Jennings will perform a live duet, Sea Inside Our Skin, with Double Vision’s Joshua Lacourse. Inspired by the Chinese maxim: “drink the water, remember its source”, this performance invites the audience to reflect on the roles of breath and water as inner sources of nourishment that push us forward in our external environments, thus reconnecting the manmade with the natural. Sea Inside Our Skin was made possible in part with a research and development residency and support by Vermont Performance Lab with support from the Vermont Community Foundation.
Movement Workshop: Becoming Human Saturday, January 26, 2019, 1 – 2:30 p.m. BCA Center, 2nd Floor, LBG Room $15 / $10 BCA Members In this 90 minute workshop, develop nourishing connections with others while building upon specific methods used to generate movement in Becoming Human, an exhibition currently on view at the BCA Center. This workshop offers the opportunity for non-dancers and trained dancers alike to explore creative movement in a safe, fun and professionally guided manner. No training necessary. Age 18 and over. Team taught by Pauline Jennings and Joshua Lacourse. Register online at: burlingtoncityarts.org.
BCA Exhibitions are funded in part by a grant from the Vermont Arts Council and the National Endowment for the Arts. Farrell Distributing and Sugar Snap Catering are proud sponsors of BCA Center exhibitions and events. 135 CHURCH STREET, BURLINGTON VERMONT | BURLINGTONCITYARTS.ORG