Tap Lessons
2-part Video Diptych with sound / Archival Pigment Prints. 2015/2021
Tap Lessons explores the body and its skin as a site of pleasure and disturbance through the memory of a childhood dance class and the material of pink elastic tights. Diptych 1 is a composite video of 8 girls performing their tap routine. Diptych 2 shows a performance of the artist snapping and probing pink elastic against her skin, up close and in slow motion.
Tap Lessons is exhibited as both large-scale projections and through large format Archival Pigment Prints.
Semio-politics of a foot (an essay on Tap Lessons):
The foot as the furthest part from the brain, yet the repository of language, emoting, individuality (and conformity).
Independent, animated vessel of force and expression, but neglected next to that other expressive distal limb, the hand.
Organizing principles: height, length, lift, stability, stillness and locomotion. (Inertia)
Unknown master to the system, smoldering, listening, reflecting and acting.
They said I might sit this one out, that I might be too big for this particular dance, but they failed to see that my feet are big too.
Treasure troves of (pre) lingual gems.
Like an acid flashback I can all of a sudden recall how much I loved the click on the floors, the shiny floor sheen, the slipperiness and the photograph of my mother in a dense pink costume with tights and a headband, and another photograph of my brother as a child in the same costume, and Shirley Temple singing Good Ship Lollipop, learning the lyrics in the backseat then front seat of my mother’s car on the way to my lesson.
When was that exactly?
When did it start?
The sinking feeling, not wanting to go, not wanting to push the verdict, taking the shoes off with relief.
Retreat into silence, stillness, invisibility.
Only to make myself invisible, starting with the foot, so that I could walk amongst any of the many fantasies like a dream creature.
The fantasy is not that which flees from reality, but rather the organizing principle of it. It’s what gives it its sheen of uniformity, its cohesiveness.
Without it, I would just be a pile of muddied mumbled pieces, the patent leather squeezing the flesh of my foot, the clasp coming loose, and the rim of the underpants imprinted on my upper thigh, the flesh bound by thick pink nylon, spilling over the edge.
And all this would just be floorboards coming loose, the mirror image of little girls tilted and torqued revealing us all to look like circus freaks, tears and smiles running down faces, lost amidst conflicted, careening, colliding visions.
And beneath the floor nothing, the clasp comes loose and is lost.
The reenactment is just a way to return to a certain clarity of vision, in order to watch its destruction again, and again, and again.
Tap Lessons, High quality archival prints from video, 17” x 22”
(contact artist for pricing)