KANDIS WILLIAMS
Triadic Ballet , 2021 Video, color, sound, 8:53 min. Dimensions variable Courtesy the Rosenkranz Collection Promised gift, Whitney Museum of American Art
Kandis Williams’ video installation Triadic Ballet (2021) triangulates movement, sound, and archival moving images, echoing the conceptual triadic form of Bauhaus artist Oskar Schlemmer’s 1922 dance of the same name. Placing the dancer both along, in front of, and behind the lines of a floor diagram divided into six triangular parts, Williams constructs a symbolic space that alternates between registers of flatness and three- dimensionality. Performed by Natasha Diamond-Walker, a soloist in the Graham Dance company, the sequences stitch movements from vernacular dance cultures, performed alongside appropriative citations of Graham’s floor exercises. Williams builds a further dimension to this kinetic architecture; each movement corresponds to a sequence of aural phrases, including a score with a rendering of the Lord’s Prayer in Morse code crafted by cellist and sound designer Patrick Belaga, and a composition by improvisational jazz musician Tapiwa Svosve that travels through eras of popular American musical sounds and haptic cell phone notification sounds. The dancer’s movements are also responsive to a sequence of clips playing on a screen behind her, merging canonized twentieth century dance forms with contemporary performances including marching bands, step squads, and Beyoncé’s performance at the Super Bowl. The intermittent appearance of time stamps and archive logos indicate the research process that underpins Williams’ practice, reinforced by the video’s presentation on the analog monitors usually found in library archives.
Installation views: KandisWilliams, Triadic Ballet, 2021, in Mountain /Time, Aspen Art Museum, 2022. Photo: Simon Klein
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