Renée Rhodes
Artist Statement
I often feel like a tourist in the places I inhabit. Maybe it’s because I know more about driving an 8-bit wagon down the Oregon Trail than about the land my childhood house was built upon, or because the internet was first described to me as a place and not just a tool, or maybe it’s a broader collective techno-lust, conveyor-belting us efficiently into the future forever.
If this endlessly mobile and unfixed state of things is my truest homeland I want to know how to belong and how to have a “sense of place” (place = land + people too). How can I remember place through physical practices, while acknowledging my own roots in a progress/technology-oriented culture.
There are many things to practice. Data becomes a danced map. I Craigslist a lost landscape’s history. I trace a map upon the palm of your hand. Strangers gather and move north together, like birds, only more awkward.
While At Headlands
While at Headlands, I’ll focus on a multi-faceted performance work comprised of walks, videos and a performance installation.
There are things to practice, like less efficient forms of togetherness, remembering place and extending beyond the legacies left to us. This constellation of works asks ‘what can I be instead of a pioneer?’
As I develop a participatory walk towards the horizon line I will learn about embodied ways of knowing and recording landscapes. My video work will feature temporary communities of strangers, that appropriate aesthetically from: countercultural game-play, the cooperative flocking of birds, and Martha Graham’s dances about frontier-ism. By remixing and responding to these legacies I hope to develop embodied practices for the present.
Research is very important too – it means hiking in the Headlands, quiet time/space for dancing, and reading too; about collective memory formation, technology’s role in alienation, and embodiment as a method for remembering.
Selected Video
Practice 1, 2009; 9 min. single channel video loop
