Description

In Rhyming Gestures, artworks dance. From the materials that make them up they take on rhythm. Hopping and rolling from ceiling to floor, they mimic and riff on the gestures of their makers, whose ritual of artmaking is, itself, dancing. 

Dance engages the body, an act of being that blends the frequencies of sound and movement in the world with those steeped deep inside our muscles. Rhyming Gestures ventures that artmaking, as in dance, does not manipulate materials towards the goal of producing objects. To dance, flesh is material. The object it produces is the dancing body, which is not an object at all, only a moment in time. Maurice Merleau-Ponty writes in Eye and Mind* that artmaking is bodily: “it is by lending his body to the world that the artist changes the world into paintings”. In making art, then, why wouldn’t the maker be dancing? Lending their body to the world, with each movement they lend the rhythm of their flesh memories. Pouring out of the body of the artist-as-dancer, rhythm saturates the artworks so that they, too, dance as a way to exist in the world.

Source: Nguyen Art Foundation.