R.I.P. Tees: A Meditation on the Archive of Mourning

Storm King Art Center, Mountainville, NY

August 4 and 5, 2017

This explorative performance held at Storm King's Outlooks: Heather Hart will consider the geographies of public and private monuments as they relate to inner-city spaces marked by memorialization and Storm King's new addition of Outlooks: Heather Hart.

R.I.P. Tees: A Meditation on the Archive of Mourning extends from Workman's textile-based, t-shirt works embarked upon during her 2016 residency at Shandaken: Storm King. Workman's practice considers the multiplicity of the memorial t-shirt as a cartographic corporeal marker. She points to the radical, performative possibilities of bridging literature, verbal testimony, installation, and oratorical history. Workman writes:

"Through a material investigation of ephemera and infrastructural materials, I am exploring what it means to visualize and construct a memorial within visible and hidden spaces. Many of these sites I describe as 'empty,' 'invisible' and 'hidden in plain sight.' Sculpture and installation have served as my foundation for instigating complex narratives of monuments as they exist within public and private spaces. I am particularly interested in the formal and aesthetic language of the street side memorial and the cultural coding of the 'R.I.P. T-shirt.' This work shows up in my practice as a series of questions: what constitutes a memorial, a public monument and who, specifically, are the people and events that matter enough to be publicly memorialized?"

This program is presented with Storm King Art Center as part of their ongoing Wanderings and Wonderings series. Initiated in 2013 by the Storm King Art Center, Wanderings and Wonderings invites visitors to engage with artists in creative and unexpected ways. Participating artists have created tours, maps, performances, poetry and movement workshops, new media, and deeply thoughtful conversations. Since 2015, Wanderings and Wonderings has been co-presented with Shandaken: Storm King, and features select alumni and their collaborators.

Lachell Workman (b. 1989, Stratford, CT) is an interdisciplinary artist based in New York and Connecticut. She received her BFA in Photography from the University of Connecticut in 2011, and her MFA from SUNY Purchase College in 2015. Her work considers ritualistic practices of mourning and memorialization within inner-city spaces as a site for radical visibility. Through deconstructing ephemera such as family snapshots, t-shirts, and infrastructural materials, she works to disrupt and narratives of grief from a disproportionate trauma weighted in the black body. Her recent exhibitions include THREE. at We Buy Gold (2017), Where We Land, The Union for Contemporary Art, Queering Space at Yale University (2016), and Dineo Seshee Bopape, Untitled (of the occult instability) [feelings] at the Palais de Tokyo, Paris, France (2016).