Migration of Gesture

Media Installation and Still Life: Portia Cobb, Maria Gillespie, Nirmal Raja
Music Composition and Performance: Barry Paul Clark
Video Montage Editing: Christal Wagner

Migration of Gestures is an interdisciplinary collaboration between artists Maria Gillespie, Nirmal Raja and Portia Cobb. This work experiments with gestures as embodied inscriptions embedded in their discrete practices. Through a cyclical process of a daily call and response, the artists created one-minute works. They contemplated and activated these movements and mark-makings as migrations among and across each of their mediums. The intersections between the artists and their works reveal their hand in shaping a visual lexicon born from their singular practices. The result is a visual conversation among artists separated by the pandemic, revealing connections across their forms. Each call and response illuminates a shared influence making its presence in each work, independent but not isolated.

Composer Barry Paul Clark created the music by watching, performing, and recording his response to the visual and movement gestures of Cobb, Gillespie and Raja. Clark utilized both analog and synthesized instruments in improvised performance and audio sampling, as well as drone composition and random sequence generation.

The installation also includes an object archive as a document of this exchange. Scholar Brian Massumi frames an object as “an abstraction from its becoming”. One can view the video installation as documenting the process of becoming and the objects as abstractions of what has passed and what is yet to come.