#CripRitual – Doris McCarthy Gallery, UTSC.
Feb 8 – April 1, 2022.
2021. B&W Split screen looped video (24:46), looped video of interpretive description as text and audio (5:38), chair, parabolic speaker, handheld sound vibration speaker.
Precarious Gestures is a performance as performed for video, curated by Critical Design Lab for the exhibition #CripRitual at the Doris McCarthy Gallery, UTSC.
In the looped B&W split-screen video installation in the Doris McCarthy Gallery, I repeatedly fall and get up again. Two cameras record my performance simultaneously. On the left there is a fixed wide-angle view from the floor. On the right, a hand-held close-up camera follows me through the space. The audio is projected over a chair in the space directly in front of the video and a small hand-held speaker on the chair transmits the sound of the video through sound vibrations.
Precarious Gestures was a performance for video of my enactment of a daily ritual I have created through performative negotiations with aging and disability.
As a performance artist addressing the body in relation to personal history and as a visual artist where the act of drawing a mark is embodied in the mark itself, I have been developing a tool kit of performative strategies for my survival as a disabled artist. These include a daily practice in which I lower myself down to the floor and then invent ever new alignments of leg bones, gravity and arm muscles, to lift myself up again, and to sit on a chair. As my body replays the echoes of the struggle and the poetry of this journey, I mark the day by drawing one more line.
Precarious Gestures reframes my performance and drawing practice into a daily performative gesture of survival, the ability to get up off the floor a marker of the progress of my disease. This was a response to the accumulated trauma of being publicly shamed and outed as disabled. It was an opportunity to reframe my own narrative. As video, it offers viewers an intimate window into a different normal, envisioning a place that straddles struggling body and drawing in space.
Created and Performed by Leena Raudvee
Videographer and Sound Design: Alexandra Gelis
Artist Coach: claude wittman
Technical Support: Clement Kent
Sound device created in collaboration with Alexandra Gelis
Interpretive Audio Description:
In a separate video, I read my interpretive audio description of the video, Precarious Gestures, as text and audio, as a personal reflection on the experience of performing my daily ritual. It appears as white text on black background. (5:38).
The text was written and read by Leena Raudvee, recorded by Clement Kent, and transcribed onto video by Alexandra Gelis.
Video of Precarious Gestures with closed captions:
Video of the text of the interpretive audio description of Precarious Gestures read by Leena Raudvee.
Produced with the support of the City of Toronto through the Toronto Arts Council
