Motion Capture: Recent Acquisitions in Media and Performance

Featuring a selection of works added to the Walker’s collection since 2020, Motion Capture offers a compelling look at ways that artists make performance and dance central to their work in video, film, painting, sculpture, and drawing. Borrowing its title from the imaging technique that digitally registers motion, the presentation explores unexpected effects that can result when different art forms converge. Artists in this exhibition translate dance into 3D animations, sculptures, quilted collages, and other forms, manipulating time and perception in the process.

At the heart of the show is the video installation We Are in Hell When We Hurt Each Other (2020) by artist Jacolby Satterwhite, who is known for his otherworldly environments imagined through performance, painting, sculpture, and animation. Satterwhite’s piece explores the possibilities of a post-pandemic, post-revolutionary universe through images of dancers captured using his own movements against a green screen. In the work deader than dead (2020), artist Ligia Lewis experiments with her first dance made for the camera. Made during the pandemic, the work uses the final soliloquy from Shakespeare’s Macbeth as point of departure to reflect on repetition and stasis. The significance of motion across artistic disciplines is also manifest in two-dimensional works, including Jimmy Robert’s folded paper sculpture Untitled (Plié IV) (2020), which is inspired by a ballet exercise.