Interdisciplinary artist Katherine Simóne Reynolds presents a selection of videos made between 2016 and 2023 that variously engage with what she describes as “psychogeographies of Blackness.” Trained as a dancer and working across photography, sculpture, video, installation, and curatorial projects, Reynolds often employs movement, affect, and feeling to explore social frameworks, from a jolting encounter with urban disinvestment in the artist’s hometown of Saint Louis in the series Structural Humor to the tender portrait of her grandparents at the heart of Willie and Pat Do a Slow Dance.
In her newest work, A different kind of tender, Reynolds delves into the layered histories of two towns in Southern Illinois: Cairo, first established as a port on the Mississippi River, and Brooklyn, the country’s oldest incorporated Black town, which was founded by the abolitionist Priscilla “Mother” Baltimore in 1829. Using the keloid (a kind of scar tissue) as a metaphorical prism, the work considers postindustrial Midwestern landscapes in relation to modes of healing and repair, perceptions of abandonment and fertility, and Black female imagination. Reynolds appears as the Queen, a character moving through the video’s Rust Belt locations (echoing, from a different perspective, regional histories central to the recently opened exhibition LaToya Ruby Frazier: Monuments of Solidarity), reflecting on these communities’ present conditions and possible futures.
Structural Humor: School for Sale. 2016. USA. 4 min.
Willie and Pat Do a Slow Dance. 2018. USA. 20 min.
A different kind of tender. 2023. USA. 39 min. New York premiere
The screening is followed by a conversation with the artist, moderated by Sophie Cavoulacos, associate curator in the Department of Film.