Defying gravity

Suddenly the audience was enveloped in darkness. We awaited the commencement. Two screens turn on, showing poetic verses scrolling up. Then, the music started flowing through the space, conducted by Asante Owusu-Brafi, Angel Bat Dawid, and Ishmael Ali as they sat under a somber blue light. Ethereal sounds and light piano keys echoed. I see a black swing set, without the swing, in the middle of the stage and then Nereida Patricia walks on, reciting words with a force that shakes the room. The music shifts towards deeper and darker notes. The screen is slowly changing, and the words rise anew. They read, “ON EARTH GRAVITY IS NOT UNIVERSAL AND NO ONE FEELS ITS PULL THE SAME.” This sense of time and space spiraled out of control throughout the play, titled TRAP DOOR, but this line alone held so much weight.

Angel Bat Dawid performing in TRAP DOORCredit: Courtney Morrison

The screen goes on to read, “ON THE MOON THE FORCE OF GRACE OVERCOMES GRAVITY HERE, GIFTED BUTTERFLY WINGS FROM THE GODS OF TRANSFORMATION/ANGELS GUIDE THEIR SISTERS BELOW.” A lingering sense of hope persists throughout the performance at Steppenwolf Theatre, hand in hand with despair, pain, violence, and death. Just as I grasp onto the words on the screen, they move away as we are introduced to the other performers: Emily Yan Neale, Jarais Musgrove, and Lileana Pryde Davis Moore, or Lily. A live feed of the performance is being projected behind the stage on a curtain and is showing Lily’s point of view via a GoPro attached to her body. We as an audience are experiencing both the play and live recording in real time but due to a delay in the feed, there is an altercation of time. A shift if you will. This pertains to how differently we all experience time especially in terms of racial violence and privilege. The performers recount and experience moments of violence while the audience looks on from a distance. While looking at a screen, even more distance is created. We are not experiencing the same sense of time nor the same sense of gravity.

The audience experienced the play in real time and via a live feed that operated on a slight delay.Credit: Courtney Morrison

Jagged movements, sensual waves. The performers move throughout, interacting with each other and the architecture of a sex swing in the middle of the stage. Some of their movements replicate swinging while others are a bit more violent. The stage, set up as a sidewalk, holds multiple meanings; games of hopscotch act as a playful metaphor for childhood on one side, sex workers can be seen walking down the cracked pavement on the other. These bleed into each other and blur time. Patricia says, “Every minute the sidewalk gets hotter and hotter. Apartment buildings and hair salons burn for insurance money creating a pink haze that sits below the clouds. It scorches the tops of skyscrapers causing a rain of metallic silver to fall on unsuspecting pedestrians below.” The sidewalk holds multiple experiences and timelines. On one end, children use chalk to draw a competitive game while on the other, that same white chalk is used to outline someone’s body at the scene of a crime. Later on, Jarais yells into a fan next to a tracing of Patricia’s body with glitter inside. The screaming can barely be heard, as if yelling into a void. Who is paying attention to the deaths of trans women of color? “Where did all my sisters go? I was looking for them and then they disappeared,” Patricia says. 

Sites of remembrance

held in a vase by flowers

Drowning in the very water that keeps them alive

Lost in the lines of time

Taking flight using wings tied by lace 

And glued by glitter

(CA)

In “Gifted Wings,” the artists’ tools of excess feel liberatory.Credit: Dabin Ahn

A week after Patricia’s collaborative and riveting TRAP DOOR, an iteration of the performance finds a short-term home at Jude Gallery. Born from a conversation between artist Yae Jee Min and Nereida Patricia at Min’s birthday party some two years ago, “Gifted Wings” is a duo exhibition that explores spiritual resilience as praxis. The two artists and Jude Gallery organizer Francine Almeda planned out the show just months after both artists moved out of Chicago. Although the opening falling a week after TRAP DOOR was a happy accident, the timing feels fortuitous. Almeda opened the gallery up for Cristobal and me the Monday after the opening, and there was a palpable afterglow left over from Friday’s spirits. Debris—mostly glitter—was swept into a corner, and various champagne flutes and coupes were carefully placed to the side. 

“Gifted Wings” opens with Min’s Floating in compression. The painting’s markings are otherworldly condensation trails where the sky meets the deep aquamarine of the sea, and the strokes come together to evoke a distorted image of a creature in flight. The sheer size of the work in comparison to the rest of the show allows it to be a meeting place in Jude’s first room, where I imagine the angels and birds from Patricia’s Colored People’s Time skim its surface. There is a swirling pool within this glass-beaded, glittering acrylic painting, that—amidst the composition’s disappearing figure, blue-winged form, and central Black angel—works as one of the show’s many abstract entry points into Patricia and Min’s mythos.

Nereida Patricia’s Vertical AscentCredit: Dabin Ahn

In a visual sense, I was curious how the pairing of the artists would play out, whether their disparate vibrancies would feel disconnected or disjointed, but the effect was the opposite. Placed against one another the works are resonant. After each examination of beaded relief and sequined stroke, I found myself searching the pieces for more–color, meaning, and texture. The artists’ tools of excess feel liberatory.

After lingering in the first room, I walked quickly through the back corridor, passing another of Min’s diptychs, and Patricia’s If you give a dog a bone, to watch TRAP DOOR. In the viewing room, a giant platform heel, functioning as a seat, rests atop a gravel floor. The projection on the wall screens a 36-minute video of the performance, which features innumerable angles from the three stagings the artist completed with her troupe. In between the Sunday performance and the Friday opening, Patricia and videographer Asante Owusi-Brafit edited all the footage together in one take, taking the pair 12 hours. Headphones on, my foot grazed the gravel below the platform, and I watched and listened to TRAP DOOR, whose video format emulates the same cacophonous joy and strife as the in-person experience. 

Gallery visitors can sit atop a giant platform heel to watch the documentation of TRAP DOOR.Credit: Dabin Ahn

Considering the image of a sequined platform in the sky, in Vertical Ascent, and the often abstract and mythic subjecthood that TRAP DOOR employs, the hardness of the gravel below the high heel drives home the gravity of the life and death at stake here. Patricia encourages audience members to consider the physical reality of the sidewalk as a site of “sex work and also memorials, a common place for a lot of people and ideas.”

The extended metaphor of gravity, or lack thereof, rings true throughout the entire exhibition. With the increased visibility of trans women in the public sphere, most often affluent white trans women, the material reality of surviving as a trans woman of color remains arduous. Patricia revels in this paradox of trans visibility—transforming it— playing with the immaterial and the mythic as a partial solution. She and her accomplices harness the spiritual, as her fellow performers declare, “I found God in myself and I loved her.” This proclamation, from Ntozake Shange’s For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/ When the Rainbow is Enuf, poignantly situates TRAP DOOR and its video iteration within the lineage of choreo-poems and plays written about the experiences of women of color. 

Together, Min and Patricia’s abstract works in “Gifted Wings” produce a rousing and spiritual effect. There is a blissful unknown in the places their pieces go and yet a clarity in their shared revelings of transformation. Their works are entry points, or trap doors, created to give us a glimpse into the artists’ shared worlds. Though there are heavy truths to the stories told, “Gifted Wings” floats us to the edge of a black hole, where all things are flattened and pulled in at once, equivocated, and “A butterfly SIX feet FIVE inches tall in PLATFORM heels with a POST-OP PUSSY serving cunt,” laughs, gleefully telling us these stories from her point of singularity. (JR)

“Gifted Winds”Through 3/5: by appointment, Jude Gallery, 629 W. Cermak, Unit 240, judegallerychicago.com

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