As part of the inauguration of the Troubled Waters Art Archive, scholars Junika Hawker-Thompson and Madeleine LeCesne curated two performances by artists Joelle Mercedes and AJ McClenon. The Troubled Waters Art Archive (TWAA) is a recently initiated archival project hosted by Northwestern University’s HAT lab in collaboration with the Black Arts Consortium. TWAA seeks to document artists of color grappling with impending ecological issues in order to provide greater access to and further pedagogical opportunities to understand art and culture through an ecological framework. In his 2019 book The Ecological Eye addressing this subject, art historian Andrew Patrizio advocates for what Felix Guattari referred to as “a radical reconsideration” of humanity’s relationship to nature.1 Patrizio suggests that, much like how artists have begun to engage ecological issues of extractive Capitalism or wasteful fabrication practices, critics and art historians ought to understand human cultural activities as responses to and engagements with the environment.2 TWAA presented in this event reflects a burgeoning understanding of the intersectionality of art making. The archive and performances both addressed individual identity as a function or by-product of history and location.

        Joelle Mercedes’s performance began in an unsettling darkness. They silently entered the room, laid on the floor and began singing; their voices carried themselves over the lapsing rhythm of a damaged vinyl record. At the same time, a striking scarlet light flooded the space to reveal their body, contorting into different forms and postures resembling isles emerging from the sea. There was something stark in the simplicity of this introduction. This hypnotic reverie was dismantled by a wall of noise—harsh and imposing. Mercedes reached for a small wooden flute sculpted to look like a bird, painted bright shades of red, yellow, green, and blue. The piercing howls of the whistle stabbed through the deep growling roar of the deafening industrial soundscape while the rhythm of the scratching vinyl skipped on. The imposing soundscape persisted in the renewed darkness for a time as Mercedes departed the room.

        Mercedes’s voice rang out, painting the silence with brushstrokes of verbiage, illuminating the intersectionality of their identity relative to colonialism and island ecology. It formed an alternative index, which read as a post-colonial alphabet and was subtitled A Place Where The World Found Itself (Outliving the Bloodstream of a Dead Space). Specific letters and particular words were punctuated by a kind of call-and-response, where the artist invited the audience to repeat a word or phrase, amplifying tangential themes of sexuality, gender, and colonialism. Mercedes entered the space again and resumed crawling. Their crawling evolved into a series of postures. When the sound dissipated, leaving the waning a cappella singing to fill the void left by the evaporated sonic assault. Mercedes exited the room through a backdoor, unveiling the glimmering green foliage drenched in the last rays of twilight before the audience descended back into the darkness of the small triangular room. Mercedes’s piece felt like a gut punch—a shot to the senses that had been set up beautifully by a combination of movement, sound, and language. In unpacking the layers of their piece, signifiers of the environment like the 1970 album created by Roger Payne, Songs of the Humpback Whale, melded with the movement of the body and spoken language. The juxtaposition of these disparate elements allowed Mercedes to negotiate a geography of the self.

        Upon returning to the room after a brief intermission, the space was entirely transformed as A.J. McClenon and Zachary Nicol began their performance. Fragments of coastal landscapes were projected and distended, becoming further abstracted as the images rested upon textural objects such as woven mats, fishing nets, and buoys. The performance itself centered around two characters, VEGA and Ramo, working to create the sense that time was unfolding in a spiral, with the past, present, and future that interrupted and overlapped upon each other. The narratives of VEGA and Ramo straddled science fiction, memoir, and collage. VEGA grappled with an “encounter with the emergent subjectivity of Ashton Coochie.”3 From this monologue, events shattered through space and time: screaming harmonica played while crawling on the floor; fierce and intense improvised dancing; a droning rendition of All the Small Things by Blink-182 delivered with a malevolent edge; memories of fond times; familial histories. It was a tidal wave of sensory inputs from lighting changes, music, noise, the spoken word, image, memory, and movement shot and ricocheted around the space. The piece concluded with a haunting chorus of a gospel song which lingered for what felt like a lifetime.

        McClenon sought to destabilize fixed notions of identity and time by calling into question the status quo of contemporary American society and constructing an alternative world. However, it was through the act of world building that they sought to accomplish this. McClenon transposed the critical into the constructive through their world building. There was a rich amount of environmental storytelling going on in the mise-en-scène such as the blurry blue photographs of dolls set in some simulated nightlife or the rambling monologue delivered from Ramo in a voiceover.

        The distortions of songs, such as the droning rendition of Blink-182 as well as the fast-paced dancing shifted the experience of duration for the audience. From the development of the two central characters to the presentation of materials, a pocket dimension was formed. Yet, McClenon’s ambition presented an issue regarding audience immersion. The relatively short duration of the piece and the confined space reinforced a very linear experience of time, which was opposed to the non-linear nature of McClenon’s constructed world within which VEGA and Ramo inhabited.

        Showcasing the ongoing necessity of documenting and educating the public on ecology and performance art, the Troubled Waters Art Archive will surely be an invaluable resource. Both Mercedes’s and McClenon’s pieces unpacked identity by expanding the discussion to include a whole host of interlaced issues from history, culture, geography, and politics. As performance art grapples with a more interconnected, technologically complex, and politically conflicted society, the aesthetic and formal qualities have begun to mirror these social changes. Mercedes and McClenon’s work both utilized technology to address the interplay of time presented as history and memory and individual identity. Both performances portrayed the unresolved relationship to identity which social norms have instructed us from an early age. The entire evening was a call to reconsider aspects of our societies, our cultures, our histories, and ourselves.

John Thomure is a performance artist and writer currently based in Chicago. His performance and writing practices fixate on local art history, ecology, and exploring underappreciated artists and their archives.

Notes

1.  Felix Guattari, The Three Ecologies (London, Athlone Press, 2000):

2.  Andrew Patrizio, The Ecological Eye (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2019):

3.  Excerpt from digital pamphlet provided during the performances.