Punctures | Kite’s Everything I Say Is True

Saturday, December 7, 2019, 7pm
$7 General, $5 Members, free for ArtsAccess pass holders

Performance artist, visual artist, and composer Kite will perform a piece integrating dress, sound, video, and emerging technologies with her family’s ephemera and historical documents. Join us for this special performance of Everything I Say Is True, tied to Kite’s installation in the gallery, followed by a Q&A with the artist and Jolene Rickard.

Kite aka Suzanne Kite is an Oglala Lakota performance artist, visual artist, and composer raised in Southern California, with a BFA from CalArts in music composition, an MFA from Bard College’s Milton Avery Graduate School, and is a PhD student at Concordia University and Research Assistant for the Initiative for Indigenous Futures. Her research is concerned with contemporary Lakota epistemologies through research-creation, computational media, and performance practice. Recently, Kite has been developing a body interface for movement performances, carbon fiber sculptures, immersive video & sound installations, as well as co-running the experimental electronic imprint, Unheard Records.

Jolene Rickard is an Associate Professor in the departments of History of Art and Art, and the Director of the American Indian and Indigenous Studies Program (AIISP) at Cornell University, Ithaca. Her research and artistic practice focus on contemporary Indigenous art, materiality, and ecocriticism with an emphasis on Haudenosaunee aesthetics. A selection of publications include: “Arts of Dispossession,” in From Tierra del Fuego to the Artic: Landscape Painting in the Americas, Art Gallery of Ontario (2015), The Emergence of Global Indigenous Art, Sakahán, National Gallery of Canada (2013), Visualizing Sovereignty in the Time of Biometric Sensors, The South Atlantic Quarterly: Sovereignty, Indigeneity, and the Law, 110:2 (2011) and Haudenosaunee Art: “In the Shadow of the Eagle”, Three Centuries of Woodlands Indian Art: A Collection of Essays (ERNAS Monographs 3) (2007). Jolene is on the editorial board of American Art, the Otsego Institute and is part of the Initiative for Indigenous Futures (IIF). She co-curated two of the four inaugural exhibitions of the National Museum of the American Indian (2004-2014). Jolene is from the Tuscarora Nation, turtle clan.

This performance is part of Punctures: Textiles in Digital and Material Time. Consisting of three exhibitions and public programs that weave into each other, Punctures features artists who are invested in the intersections and history of textile practices, media art, and critical and liberatory politics, including trans fashion and domesticity; gendered and immigrant labor under global racial capitalism; Gelede women’s commemoration, protest and power as represented in textile work; speculative future-casting through Oglala Lakota knowledge systems, and more. The exhibition features installations by Betty Yu, Cecilia Vicuña, Charlie Best, Eniola Dawodu, Kite, and Sabrina Gschwandtner, performances by Charlie Best, Jodi Lynn Maracle, and Kite, and screenings of work by Jodie Mack, Pat Ferrero, Sabrina Gschwandtner, and Wang Bing. Punctures design by Kelly Walters.