Resume at the Point of Interruption (2022)
Lens-based artist Dana Washington-Queen uses writing and video-making as an inquiry into freedom and escape. What are freedom’s possibilities? Where can it be found; what does it feel like? These questions, among others, animate the video installations, collages, and sculptures that constitute her solo exhibition.
The title of this exhibition is taken from the National Basketball Association rulebook, section XIV, which stipulates that officials can suspend a game for unusual circumstances. The game must then resume where the basketball was at the point of interruption. Washington-Queen, who grew up playing sports, situates the iconography of basketball in histories both deep and personal to see how the laboring, spectacled, and surveilled Black body functions for different gazes—and performs minor, fugitive, and creative acts of freedom at the same time.
Washington-Queen’s text “The Black Noetic” is the conceptual springboard for all of the presented works. This text was inspired in part by poet Kevin Young’s statement that “the fabric of black life has often meant its very fabrication, making a way out of no way, and making it up as you go along.” Ultimately, the exhibition is an experimental portrait of improvisatory Black life, a moving portrait that traces a continuum of interruption, suspension, and possible recovery.
"Black Noetic theory" in practice.
Black Noetic theory (BNt) is both a methodology for art production and psychological response to human conflict, specifically for the black figure. Noetic comes from the Greek term noetiko, relating to the mind or intellect. Borrowing from the Institute of Noetic Sciences, noetic is defined as “inner wisdom, direct knowing, intuition, or implicit understanding.” A noetic experience can be understood as gut feelings, insights that seem to come out of nowhere, precognition or spiritual-ancestral linkages.
BNt continues author Kevin Young’s inquiry on the artful dodge (or the art of escape) in black American history and culture. In The Grey Album: On the Blackness of Blackness, Young writes, “I’m interested in the ways the fabric of black life has often meant its very fabrication, making a way out of no way, and making it up as you go along” (17). Such unpredictability is a fundamental effect of cultures of violence and dispossession; however, despite the barriers, there’s always a will to survive for the black figure. “Making a way out of no way” is a kind of resourcefulness, an ingenuity referring back to intuition. Under duress, an intuitive expression or enactment is a stabilizing force for maintaining order in the precarity of black/queer lives on the margin.
Field Goal, Goal Tend
"Field Goal, Goal Tend," 2022.
Proof of Flight
A durational video composed of footage from a slam dunk camera mounted on a sculptural backboard marked with prints made from slapping hands stained with nicotine chew. The work ties the surveillance and commodification of the Black sporting body to the surveillance and commodification of the Black enslaved body enlisted in crop production. The repeated, looped striking gesture illustrates how a body that is transformed into both product and producer gradually gets worn, used, and discarded over time.
The Virginia-grown tobacco leaves hung from an unfinished wooden post. Over the course of the exhibition, the leaves dried out and activated the olfactory sense as gallery-goers moved throughout the space.
"Proof of Flight," 2022.
Detail view of "Proof of Flight", 2022.
Ode to AND1: Notes on the Sporting Black Body (2020)
An analytical video essay that uses archival VHS footage from the AND1 Mixtape Vol. 1 (1998), documentation of a traveling basketball competition and exhibition presented by the apparel company. The work illustrates how video editing techniques can extend the meaning and motion of the Black body in digital space.
AND1 was a popular footwear and clothing company specializing in basketball attire and goods that sponsors NBA athletes and high-school basketball teams across the country. Founded in 1993, the company was named after a phrase used by basketball broadcasters to describe the free throw awarded to a player fouled while scoring a goal. Ode to AND1: Notes on the Sporting Black Body is an analytical video essay that uses archival VHS footage from the AND1 Mixtape Vol. 1 (1998), documentation of a traveling basketball competition and exhibition presented by the apparel company. The work illustrates how video editing techniques can extend the meaning and motion of the Black body in digital space.
Resume at the Point of Interruption
An experimental documentary that follows three Black individuals—including the artist—as they intuit and improvise their ways through the world.
"This experimental documentary, which lends the exhibition its title, follows Black individuals—including the artist—as they intuit and improvise their ways through the world. In the chapter on Washington-Queen, we see the queer nonbinary photographer receiving hormone replacement therapy and meditating on themes of gender, difference, constraint, and freedom, and how they experienced the limits and possibilities of all those things while playing basketball growing up and negotiating their identity as an adult.
Combining photography, moving image, and archival material, this multipart video portrait draws from personal accounts and broader histories stitched together with textual sources, including the talk “Transgender Solidarity” by counselor and theologian Ayo Yetunde and poet Kevin Young’s The Grey Album: On the Blackness of Blackness. In his collection of essays illustrating Black strategies of storytelling, lying, and improvising, Young writes, crucially, 'If we cannot first imagine freedom, we cannot actually achieve it. Freedom, like fiction and all art, is a process in which the dream is only the first part.'
As we start to imagine freedom, Washington-Queen observes here, there may not be a clear blueprint to follow. Resume at the Point of Interruption, illustrates how the Black figure, tasked with envisioning a new and different future, responds to obstacles, conflicts, crossroads, and threats with gestures—a fake-out, a doubling-back, a pivot—that may appear illogical, but which are in fact the creative gestures that will allow them to chart a course to elsewhere."
- Ania Szremski