Announcing Jonathan González as Vox’s 2022 Black Box Curatorial Fellow
Featuring projects by Marguerite Angelica Monique Hemmings, jah elyse sayers and Winter Rae Schneider
About the Fellowship
Vox Populi is pleased to announce artist, scholar, and educator Jonathan González as our 2022 Black Box Curatorial Fellow! Selected from our recent open call, González will be developing and presenting works by artists Marguerite Angelica Monique Hemmings, jah elyse sayers and Winter Rae Schneider as part of their fellowship project, Trophallaxis, with public engagements launching this fall.
Trophallaxis is the exchange of food and fluids among members of an insect community through actions of mouth-to-mouth and anus-to-mouth feeding, and touch. Along with the passage of vital nutrients, trophallaxis can involve the passage of molecules, such as pheromones, and other chemical properties that communicate across a population, greatly informing the resilience of a collective within their given ecosystem.
The following exhibition, Trophallaxis, invites artist-educator Marguerite Angelica Monique Hemmings, artist-scholar jah elyse sayers, and scholar-organizer Winter Rae Schneider, to generate works in response to the act of trophallaxis, in order to experiment with the underlying themes of inter-relationality, collective struggle, and inter-speciality.
Over the arc of the exhibition, Hemmings, sayers, and Schneider will be given an allotment of time to Vox Populi’s spaces to materialize their own research as well as attend scheduled gatherings to engage one another in-process. These periodic gatherings operate as a forum for sharing their developing work(s), cultivating systems for receiving feedback, and adapting what is being generated from what has been gathered from the exchange.
The exhibition will culminate in the presentation of public engagements taking on expressive forms including performance, dance, music, poetry, film/video and new or emergent genres.
About the Curator
Jonathan González is an artist, scholar and educator working at the intersections of choreography. Their practice examines conditions that figure Black life through research-based processes synthesized through performance, pedagogy, and time-based media, usually generated collaboratively. Their writings have been published by Contact Quarterly, Cultured Magazine, deem journal, and Angela’s Pulse. In 2019, González was a New York Dance and Performance “Bessie” nominee for Breakout Choreographer. Their work ZERO (Danspace Project, St. Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery, 2018) was nominated for a New York Dance and Performance “Bessie” Award for Outstanding Production. They have received fellowships from the Art Matters Foundation, Foundation for Contemporary Arts and the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, and have been an artist in residence at the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Maggie Allesee National Center for Choreography, and Loghaven Artist Residency.
More Info: gonzalezinfo.com
About the Artists
Marguerite Angelica Monique Hemmings is a performance artist/educator currently based in Philadelphia, USA. They focus on one’s own body, one’s own way of moving, and connecting to the unseen. They are a master of body ceremonies and a curator of vibes. As a choreographer they specialize in emergent, improvisational and social dance movement styles and technologies, rooted in the story of the African Diaspora. They are researching the ancestral and subversive role of dance and the dancer throughout the African Diaspora and look to conjure these technologies through all of their (present) work. Marguerite uses body, text, media, and moving images in their work. They direct a multimedia endeavor called we free, which looks at the millennial and gen z approach to liberation through its music, social dance and social media.
jah elyse sayers works toward spatial justice through research, writing, farming, building, teaching, organizing, and art-making at the intersections of environmental psychology, Black geographies, abolition geographies, urban studies, Black queer and trans studies, and embodiment. Their work draws on poetic, historical, and participatory methods to further struggles–especially Black queer and trans struggles–for liberatory placemaking against racial capitalism. Their writing has appeared in Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women’s and Gender Studies and BRICLab Essays; they have performed at Brooklyn Arts Exchange (BAX); and have exhibited sculptural work at MetaDen. They are currently a PhD candidate in environmental psychology.
Winter Rae Schneider is a futurist from the Delaware Valley. They follow a path of liberatory praxis at the crossroad of storytelling, power, radical love and accountability. They have been and they continue to be schooled in interdisciplinary freedom technologies, and they claim an intellectual lineage of scholars and artists reckoning with history and yearning for the next world. Rooted in West Philly, they spend their time mothering, and designing containers for historical reckoning and relational healing as co-founder of the worker-owned co-op, the Accountable History Network. They teach a critical analysis of power and facilitate thinking about structural and embodied legacies of dispossession and colonization. They practice coalitional organizing with the Philly Revenue Project, the Our City Our Schools coalition and the PILOTs (Payments in Lieu of Taxes) campaign.