Imago Foundation for the Arts will launch a new initiative related to film and video arts this fall with an artist’s talk and presentation of video art by Rai Terry at 7 p.m. September 15 at Imago Gallery, 36 Market Street, Warren. The public is invited to this free event.
Terry will present two parts of his four-part thesis project which explored his theory of the choreosonic performance of Black life functioning as a self-sustaining archive. Part II: Synaptic Vibration is an experimental movement that lays down the tracks of thought and theory from which his thinking has evolved. Part III: An Erotic Grammar, takes shape through the folktale John de Conquer as written by Zora Neale Hurston and read aloud by his mother.
Terry is an audiovisual archivist, scholar, and artist (they/them, he/him) whose work meditates on and intervenes in the nature of archival technologies as they come into contact with and are created by Black Trans/Queer communities. He says, “Much of my work prior to my thesis, has focused on trying to reconcile the violences and erasures marginalized people face in traditional archives with the richness of the ephemeral archives of Black queer life. Over the last two years, this has translated for me into the idea that Black culture functions much like the nervous system with synapses sending encoded information back and forth across geographic and social boundaries at a speed that can be witnessed, but never grasped by those who are outside of its erotic grammar.”
Terry earned a Bachelor's degree in Black Arts and Social Theory from Brandeis University and recently received a Masters of Arts in Public Humanities from Brown University, where they were the Fellow for the Study of the Public History of Slavery, Pathways Fellow with the Association of Moving Image Archivists, and winner of the Distinguished Thesis Award. Their audiovisual works have been screened at the RI Archive Remix Film Festival, The John Nicholas Brown Center for Public Humanities and Cultural Heritage, the Granoff Center for the Arts, and the Summer Teen Intensive at the RISD Museum. They currently have a fellowship with Theaster Gates to work on his Black Chapel project in London and were recently awarded a David Dornstein artist grant to support their current audiovisual project.
He says, “My hope in creating these works is to confront archival practitioners with the possibilities of archives beyond what can be learned in a library science program and to encourage them to think more critically about the way we approach the archiving field. I ask the questions: What is an archive of mourning? What is an archive that is not bound by site? What would it mean for traditional colonial archives to open themselves to impermanence, to take on a mood and then change it? What could an archive be if it opened itself to the possibility of new realities, rather than clutching to violent historical narratives?”
IFA encourages IFA artists and guest artists to explore their creativity by providing a supportive community and exhibition space. IFA also focuses on art programming for the public and collaborative projects with other local and regional organizations to promote the arts.
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