Politics Surrounded | From Giving (Medley) | Charisse Weston
Politics Surrounded | From Giving (Medley), Charisse Weston (Houston, TX)
Southern Constellations Fellow. July 2016. Video installation, handmade poetry book, restored benches.
Politics Surrounded | From Giving (Medley) is a multi-media, video installation that disrupts the cycles of desire and consumption surrounding the image and sound of black physical, mental, and spiritual labor.
The projected video installation converges recordings from various sites throughout Elsewhere with close ups of the artist performing repetitive gestures. Layers of manipulated audio of gospel and blues covers sung by Weston are amplified with background sounds.
Politics Surrounded contains a single edition poetry book entitled The Unpossessed – written, compiled, and bound by Weston. The collection of poems meditate on the value, power, representation, and elusiveness of black bodies, both absent and present, within current political and social unrest. The benches restored by Weston with Wood Library materials repair the body, reclaiming awareness and significance.
Weston questions where and how the black body resides in space, what its image and work evokes, and in what ways (if any) poetic manipulations of material transgress traditional modes of consumption, allowing alternate spaces and times to emerge wherein the body might find value outside of its boundaries.
