Making Studying
Bernadette Mayer: text & voice
Justin Rhody: photography and dual 35mm slide projections
Sophia Wang & Brontez Purnell: choreography
Tooth: 16mm film projection
Making Studying was performed at the Berkeley Art Museum, May 3rd 2013. Choreographed by Sophia Wang and Brontez Purnell, in dialogue with the text and voice of Bernadette Mayer reading from her Studying Hunger Journals (recorded specifically for this piece). Rhody & Tooth filmed and photographed aspects of Wang & Purnell's performance within the same space of the museum that it was later projected and performed in (with dual 35mm slide projections flanking a single channel 16mm projection, creating a lighted field that surrounded the dancers.) Rhody later continued working with these images, rephotographing them as 35mm slides projected onto various surfaces in the wood shop at his studio.
"I only need this space to move around in, to do nothing. It’s the same. It’s never the same. Whether you experiment with syntax or elation, the movement’s the same and it’s nothing. YOU are still here. I am still moving like someone else, someone I don’t know. If only I could take my small business seriously, move like a poet, kill like an owl. Try for an effect. And the strangest thing of all, was once, the more I work at it, the more I produce, the less it comes together, the less it’s mine." — Bernadette Mayer, Studying Hunger Journals (Station Hill Press, 2011)