The Middle Passage

About

January 21-22: Public preview
January 28-29: Elsa Waithe
February 4-5: Dante Brown | Warehouse Dance x Jayson Smith
February 11-12: Same as Sister (S.A.S.)
February 18-19: Dances for Solidarity x Chee Malabar

The Middle Passage is a performance art series curated by George Del Barrio and Kate Ladenheim using a focused camera obscura with multiple projections of the world outside the gallery to create surface-mapped stages upside-down and backwards on the gallery walls. For this project, the residential block outside of Open Source has been offered to local artists as a laboratory for a reinterpretation of the space and the landscape. The project aims to transform our shared spaces into a spectacle that allows the physics of the universe to bend in support of the artists.

During our day to day, we operate with a set of assumptions about property, space, race and gender; inside of the obscura, these rules are turned on their head. Artists of color are given the opportunity to present new versions of their work within an illuminated blackout that requires patience and observation for the viewer to fully discover. Within the blacked-out gallery, the artists will fill the space with their light, bringing site-specific to a darkened space as a subtle act of activism. Every day the theater will fade as the light dies, offering a metaphor for resilience. One act outside can be two inside; the artists in The Middle Passage will bring hope and light to dark spaces.