North America
Steffani Jemison
Personal
2014
Steffani Jemison, Personal, 2014
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Personal (2014) follows the movements of three Black men—professional Brooklyn-based actors—as they both loiter and move, walking forward, backward and in slow circles against the backdrop of the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood. Jemison utilizes techniques of repetition and the reversal of footage to weave together action in both real and manufactured time, blurring one with the other. Shot against vignettes of a basketball court, a mural of Nelson Mandela and Barack Obama, and Fulton Park, Jemison’s agitation of line poses larger challenges to narratives of racial progress. The video is in the public collections of the Brooklyn Museum and The Museum of Modern Art, in New York
Steffani Jemison is an interdisciplinary artist whose work considers issues that arise when conceptual practices are inflected by black history and vernacular culture. She uses rigorous formal methods to explore her interests in the politics of serial form, the limits of narrative description, and the tension between improvisation, repetition, and fugitivity.