Fri 10/16 @ 5:30PM
The current show at SPACES Gallery, called A Black Prayer, is an immersive installation by inter-disciplinary artist-in-residence Yelaine Rodriguez that includes photography, film, performance, ceramic sculpture and found objects. She draws on her life and background as a person of Afro-Dominican ancestry living in New York to explore Afro-syncretism, and architectural and ancestral memory.
The show grew out of a previous video performance art piece which she has re-imagined as part of this show. Miss Doc, featuring interpretive dancers and actors, is based the story of an early Black woman physician, Dr. Sarah Loguen Fraser, whose grandmother was born free and kidnapped into slavery and whose father was a well-known abolitionist who escaped slavery by crossing the Ohio River. The front gallery, where the film is being shown on loop, also holds objects, including ceramic pieces newly created by the artist, that echo the themes in the film.
The large back gallery also holds pedestals with objects: more ceramic pieces (which she created with the assistance of Brick Ceramics + Design in Cleveland’s Waterloo Arts District), including lanterns suggesting the nighttime paths followed by escaped slaves, and found objects, including bricks and shells.
The back wall is dominate by a new film piece she created during her residency that ties the show into Cleveland: a triple split screen features images based on Northeast Ohio’s extensive engagement in the Underground Railroad, with Harriet Tubman portrayed by Cleveland dancer Eboni Darkenwald. Some of it was filmed in Cuyahoga Valley National Park, standing in for the landscape escaping slaves would have traversed, again offering imagery of shells, lanterns and water. Other images show Darkenwald inside the nearby St. John’s Episcopal Historic Church, known as a stop on the Underground Railroad, from which escaped slaves departed for Canada. (The objects in the room include a pew carried by hand from St. John’s.)
Darkenwald’s striking outfit, and the costumes worn by the dancers in Miss Doc, reflect Rodriguez’s artistic roots in fashion design, her BFA major. She’s kept adding layers to her practice, earning an MA in Latin American and Caribbean studies, and currently working on a PhD in performance studies at Northwestern University in Illinois.
The artist will be at the gallery to share the story and background of the installation on Friday October 16. The show will be on view through Saturday October 17.
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