Evil Nigger Part V: Performance for Julius Eastman by Jeremy Toussaint-Baptiste & Lamont Hamilton

About

Artist, designer and composer Jeremy Toussaint-Baptiste continues his 2017 ISSUE residency, collaborating with interdisciplinary artist LaMont Hamilton at ISSUE Project Room on Sunday, October 8th, 2017. The performance is the collaborative duo’s fifth performance around Julius Eastman’s 1979 composition, “Evil Nigger.” Capacity is limited. A $5 RSVP commitment is asked to ensure seating.
 

“For this iteration, we are continuing our investigation of Julius Eastman as an archetypal trickster, specifically within the cannon of Black American cultural practice. Here, we pursue to what Eastman referred as an “organic” principle of performance, a cumulative process in which new sections of a work are overlapped with preceding sections, resulting in a dense, mounting-yet-nuanced simultaneity of expression; a pursuit through which we are able to further understand Eastman as complicating minimalist form, rather than reinforcing its emergent supremacy.

Specifically, we acknowledge Eastman’s own subtle contradiction in regards to the organic principle that “the information is taken out at a gradual and logical rate” to be an impetus to examine a principle which simultaneously preservation as well as accumulation, and the frictions which might occur upon their intersection. In making explicit the sonic, gestural and material relationships within and across each of the previous four performances in this series, we embrace the incongruity (or unfeasibility) of overlapping content without losing information.”-- Jeremy Toussaint-Baptiste

Jeremy Toussaint-Baptiste is a Bessie-nominated composer, designer and performer, living and working in Brooklyn, NY. Holding an MFA from Brooklyn College’s Performance and Interactive Media program, his work, through the lens of precarious labor, complicates notions of industry, identity, and environment and the implications of the intersections of such phenomena. He is a founding member of performance collective, Wildcat!, and frequently collaborates with performers and fine artists, including Jaamil Olawale Kosoko, André M. Zachery, and Yanira Castro/a canary torsi. He has presented at the Brooklyn Museum, Newark Museum, Under The Radar at The Public Theater, The Studio Museum In Harlem, National Sawdust, The Jam Handy (Detroit), Tanz Im August at Hau3 (Berlin), American Realness at Abrons, Knockdown Center, Gibney Dance, FringeArts (Philadelphia), Judson Church, Stoa Cultural Center (Helsinki), MIT, Arts East New York, JACK, Painted Bride Art Center (Philadelphia), University Settlement, Harlem Stage, as well as on Dazed Digital, Complex, and Boiler Room. He is a 2017 Artist-In-Residence at Issue Project Room.

LaMont Hamilton is an autodidact interdisciplinary artist working in Chicago and New York. Hamilton works primarily in photography, film and performance. Hamilton has been the recipient of several fellowships and awards including most recently the Brown Foundation Fellowship, MacDowell Colony, Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship, Artadia Award, ArtMatters Grant and the City of Chicago's IAP Award.