Christie Neptune, Constructs and Context Relativity, Performance II, 3 Channel HD Video and Super 8mm Transfer. TRT 12:30mins
Constructs and Context Relativity, Performance II (2021)
Performance II is a three-channel experimental digital performance investigating codified systems in space and their inherent implications. Through diaristic reflections in the urban, long-take improvisation, and virtual collaboration, I examine how the interpretive registries of point of view, physiology, and proximity inform one’s modes of perception. In this iteration of the Construct and Context Relativity series, screen practice deepens this discursive. Three CRT monitors placed side by side in the gallery transmit a distinct viewpoint that disrupts the linear progression of time. The film’s disintegration across three channels disorients the spectator’s spatial awareness, fostering new dimensions of understanding. This disjuncture is integral to the film’s premise and understanding. It allows space for the viewer to consider the dialectic relations (immaterial and material) that inform their perceptual and subjective reality. Constructs and Context Relativity, Performance II premiered on Thursday, June 24, 2021, in Social Works curated by Antwuan Sargent at the Gagosian in New York City.
Installation view of “Constructs and Context Relativity II,” (2021) in Social Works at Gagosian, New York, NY, June 24, 2021, to September 11, 2021. Image courtesy of Gagosian.
Christie Neptune, Untitled Film Still, Constructs and Context Relativity, Performance II, 3 Channel HD Video and Super 8mm Transfer. TRT 12:30mins.
Christie Neptune, Untitled, 2021, Super 8m film still, Archival inkjet print, 18 x 24 in (45.7 x 61 cm unframed), Edition 1 of 5 with 2 APs.
Christie Neptune, Untitled Film Still, Constructs and Context Relativity, Performance II, 3 Channel HD Video and Super 8mm Transfer. TRT 12:30mins. “When my blue gets tired, all I see is orange,” —A quote from Constructs and Context Relativity II that expounds the relationship between human physiology and color vision.
Christie Neptune, Untitled Film Still, Constructs and Context Relativity, Performance II, 3 Channel HD Video and Super 8mm Transfer. TRT 12:30mins.
Central to this project is an interactive mediated performance facilitated on Zoom. The performance invited participants to consider how the body, ‘in proximity to’ or ‘in distance from’ an object or other persons, transmits information. As a prompt, each participant was asked to prepare three statements addressed to a crowd, a friend, and an intimate partner. Utilizing the rules of space proxemics, each participant calibrated their body, gestures, and speech patterns to align with the assigned proxemic: social, personal, and intimate. The screen, in this instance, served as a mediating agent, a provocateur in the context of performance, that muddies understanding and shifts semantics. The theatricality of the virtual performance in Constructs and Context Relativity spoke to the ontology of perception—a malleable and ductile sensory experience informed by varying factors in space.