Jordan Deal. Still from MOMMA i RODE THE BEAST! (film projection titled Fool's Pillar). Image courtesy the artist.
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2023 Artist-in-Residence Benae Beamon curates Open Studios, and invites artists Jordan Deal, Michael J. Love, Kaleena Miller, and Adriana Ogle to share works-in-progress. The program considers time as an abstract and perplexing concept that is ephemeral but available for capture, and features artists whose work interrogates and interrupts time as a limiting and colonized concept. Each artist engages temporality in a different way, from explorations of memories and legacy as markers of time to Afrofuturist and unmetered reimaginings of what is possible, collectively offering a nuanced examination of where and how time intersects with our lived experiences.
Jordan Deal’s Wetlands of our Mother's Tongues in Concrete is an experimental film that explores the notions of transness, motherhood, trauma, and healing. The subject(s) (Jordan Deal and Ivonne Perez) find themselves dispersed between the channels of the ocean, fragments of memory, and time travel as they dig into their family's history through photographs and sharing stories.
With How to Rhythm Dream, Michael J. Love continues the work that he and his collaborators embarked on with his most recent full-length piece, (RHY)PISTEMOLOGY!... Here, the focus is on contemporary Black women recording artists who write/ produce/ create across identity lines to experiment with genre. What instructions can such "on wax" compositions give us for imagining and embodying possibilities for ourselves?
Kaleena Miller’s proximities records the space we’re in, and amplifies it. This soundscape combines with a tap dancer constructing phrase work inspired by the rhythms and architecture of the space. The work places attention and sensation at the forefront, seeking to create an ecosystem of listening that gives space for the audience and performers to consider/re-consider our bodies and actions in relation to other humans, structures and sounds.
Adriana Ogle’s To Let The Spell Break is an initial observation of the cyclical shape of legacies, and how the perpetuation of a cycle is affected by behavior.
View the Program
OPEN STUDIOS is a series of work-in-progress showings held regularly throughout the year, organized by guest curators, and serves as an incubator for new work, inviting the public into the artistic process.
About the Artists
Jordan Deal (aka ROSEKILLJUPITER) is a Philadelphia-based multidisciplinary practitioner and alchemist. Their investigative practice uses performance, sound, image, and their BODY as a conduit between unseen forces and the materializations of socio-political structures and mythologies. They have been investigating technologies of relations and movement that harnesses and disperses CHAOS FORCE as a subversive material and methodology. Deal has shown work in NYC at Judson Memorial Church, CPR – Center for Performance Research, The Brick, and Protocinema & Protodispatch; at Cafe OTO in London; and in Philadelphia at Icebox Project Space, Fleisher-Ollman gallery, Vox Populi, and other venues. They have recently been selected as a 2023-2024 Artistic Fellow at the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art and were a Fall 2022 Studio & Research Resident at Amant in Brooklyn, where they continued their investigations of chaos force. Deal’s films have been part of selections in Blackstar Film Festival, Icebox Project Space, and Vox Populi in Philly, at CPR – Center of Performance Research, and at the Paris Film Festival. Their last album, GOGO UNDERWORLD, was released in 2022 with Cor Ardens featuring Deal combing through waste streams of aural debris, calling in warnings of the wild global West, and ghostly mirages from past and future.
Michael J. Love is an interdisciplinary tap dance artist and scholar whose embodied research intermixes Black queer feminist theories and aesthetics with a rigorous practice that critically engages the Black cultural past as it imagines Black futurity. He is currently Assistant Professor of Dance at Ursinus College. You can learn more at dancermlove.com and find Michael on socials as @dancermlove.
Kaleena Miller makes and participates in sound-focused dance works. Her work has been presented at the Walker Art Center, American Swedish Institute, Icehouse, First Avenue, Jazz Central, and Bryant Lake Bowl in Minneapolis, and at Arts on Site and Symphony Space in New York. She has a BFA in Dance from the University of Minnesota Twin Cities, and a Deep Listening certification from the Center for Deep Listening at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Kaleena is currently splitting time between Minneapolis and New York, and is working towards an MFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. www.kaleenamiller.com
Adriana Ogle grew up dancing in the North Carolina Youth Tap Ensemble, directed by Gene Medler. In 2015, she joined Boston-based tap company Subject:Matter, performing at venues such as the Montréal Fringe Festival and The Yard. She is an alumna of the 2019 Tap Program at The School at Jacob’s Pillow, where she received the Lorna Strassler Award for Student Excellence; and, in 2021, she joined NYC-based tap company Music From The Sole. Recent performance highlights include: Marshall Davis Jr.’s Revelations in Rhythm, Okwui Okpokwasili’s Swallow the Moon at Jacob’s Pillow, the Little Island Music & Dance Festival, Bryant Park, the TODAY show, and the American Dance Guild Performance Festival. She recently premiered original choreography in the 2023 Emerging Choreographer Series via Mare Nostrum Elements, and co-choreographed material with Toru Sakuragi in the 2023 Battery Park Dance Festival.
Patrick Voller (Kaleena Miller collaborator) has been making sample-based electronic music for almost 20 years. He has recently become more interested in field recordings and incorporating these found sounds into his compositions. He enjoys improvisation, chance, and synchronicities.
Benae Beamon (she/they) (curator) was raised in North Carolina, and her work is informed by black Southern culture. She holds a B.A. from Colgate University, an M.A. in Religion from Yale University, and a Ph.D. in Social Ethics from Boston University. As a performance artist, Beamon uses movement, rhythm, space, and language as tools to sculpt sound and highlight the rich place where race, gender, sexuality, and class intersect with culture and ritual. Both her artistic work and scholarship examine the extraordinary and spectacular in the everyday, focusing on the way that the mundane can be sacred ritual. She has performed at Joe’s Pub in New York City, and the Institute of Contemporary Art Boston with Subject:Matter, a Boston-based tap dance company. Independently, she was a 2019 finalist for the Hudgen's Prize and has premiered work at VCU Institute for Contemporary Art and at Arts on Site in New York City.