2019 // 2020 Sarah Abdel-Jelil Zachary Betts Sophia Chai Kaamil A.Sophia Chai Kaamil Haider Jerome Fellowship Exhibition 2019 // 2020 Sarah Abdel-Jelil Zachary Betts This catalog was published on the occasion of the exhibition for the 2019/20 MCAD–Jerome Foundation Fellowships for Early Career Artists. January 19–March 7, 2021 MCAD Gallery Essays by Christina Chang The Jerome Foundation generously supports this fellowship program. Sophia Chai Kaamil A.Sophia Chai Kaamil Haider Jerome Fellowship Exhibition Table of Contents Sarah Abdel-Jelil 4 Zachary Betts 12 Sophia Chai 20 Kaamil A. Haider 28 Artist Biographies 36 Acknowledgments 38 Past Recipients 40 Sarah 4 Abdel-Jelil 5 Detroit Lakes, Oregon, 2019, video, dance time-lapse, Credits: created in collaboration with Gisell Calderón at Caldera Arts Center Sarah Abdel-Jelil La Napoule the Minnesota Artist from grant Initiative a 2017 Minnesota of through "Batikh possible the voters is made by Batikh State Arts Board, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the arts from State appropriation Arts heritage cultural and a legislative to fund." thanks Board, , 2018, video, dance time-lapse. Cinematographer: Gisell Calderón, Director: Sarah Abdel-Jelil, Credit:Abdel-Jelil, Sarah Director: time-lapse. Gisell dance Calderón, video, Cinematographer: , 2018, , 2019, video, dance time-lapse dance video, , 2019, Have you watched a sunset recently? Sat still and focused on the whole duration of the spectacle? It takes about thirty minutes from the moment when the horizon first cuts across the bottom edge of the diffuse disk of light to when the last rays disappear. It is one of two times during the day (the other being sunrise) when the natural rhythm dictated by the rotation of the earth on its axis is perceptible to us in a tangible way. If you are not accustomed to being still and present for an extended period of time, then the speed at which the sun disappears seems agonizingly slow. Combining dance with time-lapse photography, Sarah Abdel-Jelil’s artistic practice explores the disjunction (bottom) inherent in this disconnect between the pace of a day and the speed at which we move through it. Abdel-Jelil’s choreography is rooted in a deep, embodied awareness of a particular setting and draws on her sense impressions of the space— what she describes as “listening with the body.” These gestural “impulses” are broken down into incremental movements for the purposes of time-lapse photography. Typically, a dancer completes a move in the space of a beat of music, often a small fraction of a second. Performing Abdel-Jelil’s choreography is an altogether different feat of endurance. For example, in Kerkethen (2015), her first foray into combining dance with the time-lapse technique, a “beat” lasted several minutes, with a simple gesture such as raising and lowering an arm taking course over an hour. The resulting images, taken at much longer intervals than the standard twenty-four frames per second for film, compress time when played back at the normal rate. The dancers’ glacial movements regain a semblance of “proper” speed at the same time that subtle natural phenomena, like the slow creep of clouds across the (top) sky, take on the sweep of human drama. 6 7 Sarah Abdel-Jelil Although Abdel-Jelil is a moving image and Because time-lapse photography makes us movement artist, it is more accurate to say that her conscious of the passage of time, the rituals and work is concerned with stillness. The conflation of routines that structure each day and ground us in our timescales that she achieves through the dilation body are particularly apparent in Abdel-Jelil’s films. of action for time-lapse photography heightens A scarf drapes itself up and down in a stop-motion our awareness of the gaps between each frame. She animation of dressing and disrobing. Performers inadvertently alludes to the sustained focus and hunch their shoulders and roll down their spine until physical stamina required for time-lapse dance shoots they are fully bent at the waist in a pantomime of in a recent work created during her 2019 residency at shutting down. Bodies slowly spinning in circles with La Napoule Art Foundation in France: she melts from arms extended reference the hands of a clock. In one her chair onto the floor in an expression of what one memorable sequence, Abdel-Jelil’s seated figure travels (bottom) might interpret as “dying of boredom,” particularly around a circular stone form reminiscent of a sundial. relatable as we move into a third season of restricted Accustomed to working closely with dancers to movement and socialization in response to the develop and film her dance time-lapse choreography, (top) coronavirus pandemic. Nevertheless, the end result, Abdel-Jelil, like all of the MCAD–Jerome fellows, where the natural environment changes in time with has had to adapt her practice to the limitations human gestures, is enthralling. imposed by the coronavirus, though not necessarily Abdel-Jelil had a peripatetic childhood because in unproductive ways. She is experimenting with of her parents’ work for international organizations. outsourcing the production of images for her dance A so-called third-culture kid (as distinct from the time-lapse films, asking her subjects to photograph first culture of her parents’ homeland and the second themselves at the same time each day for three culture of her various childhood homes) accustomed months. A houseplant will register the passage of time, to continual displacement, she had lived in eight harking back to her childhood fascination with time- countries on four continents by the time she went lapse photography of the growth and decay of plants time-lapse dance video, , 2020, to college. Given the constant moving—highly that first piqued her curiosity about the subjective destabilizing for a child even without the added nature of how time is experienced. pressures of having to learn a new language and Abdel-Jelil’s films, by inviting us to pay equal , 2019, video, dance time-lapse dance video, , 2019, culture—it is not surprising that Abdel-Jelil’s creative attention to the spaces between those significant practice would center stillness over movement. Her milestones we use to measure progress, ask us to be characterization of what she terms “dance time-lapse” patient and present through stretches of time when we Room Sweet Potato is particularly telling: “I wanted people to be the don’t seem to be going anywhere—a welcome message anchor and the world to move around them.” One during this period of disruption and stalled plans. We could argue that her films also function as anchors, impose order on any sequence of impressions, which holding us fast to a position for the length of time it lends an air of inevitability and continuity to the arc. takes to watch them. To a certain extent, life is a series of events moving fast enough to read as choreography. 8 9 Sarah Abdel-Jelil , 2019, video, dance time-lapse dance video, , 2019, La Napoule 10 11 Zachary Betts slipping touch slipping (detail), 2020, cast silicone, stainless steel, leather, twine, Sferra Rik Photo: x 1.5 3.5 in. 87 cast (detail), stainless 2020, silicone, steel, leather, (detail), 2020, cast silicone, stainless steel, leather, twine, Sferra Rik Photo: x 1.5 3.5 in. 87 cast (detail), stainless 2020, silicone, steel, leather, slipping touch slipping 12 13 Zachary Betts One measure of a society is to look at how its most vulnerable and disenfranchised members are treated. Zachary Betts goes a step further to consider how we treat the least valued and most overlooked objects in our society and what that says about our humanity. Consumer capitalism has conditioned us to jump at any opportunity to replace something we already have with something new (synonymous with better), continually supplying a mass of castoffs that are still serviceable but no longer desirable. Some of the items Betts has rescued from this functional limbo of post- use oblivion include an aluminum bat, a white-noise machine, and the metal frame of a folding lawn chair. Betts is particularly drawn to things that are all but invisible in their absolute and abject practicality. Hannah Arendt wrote, “The things of the world have the function of stabilizing human life, and their objectivity lies in the fact that—in contradistinction to the Heraclitean saying that the same man can never enter the same stream—men, their ever-changing nature notwithstanding, can retrieve their sameness, Sferra Rik x 2 in. Photo: cast x 10.5 silicone, 13 that is, their identity, by being related to the same chair and the same table.” Relating to the same objects over and over again, Arendt argues, serves to anchor one’s core sense of self even as one is continually changing. Betts likewise finds comfort in those things he can rely on day in and day out—precisely those run out, 2020, things that fade into the background because they are so familiar. 14 15 Zachary Betts The labor-intensive means by which Betts working on a series of objects based on the tread of transmutes found objects into art proceeds through his running shoe, undulating waves of translucent a series of value inversions. Relying heavily on rubber the color of no-color, what he terms his “ghost mold-making, a process typically used to create palette.” The sole of an athletic sneaker does far more over and over and over and over over multiple copies, he counters the mass-produced than the stylings of the shoe’s upper—absorbing the and commercial nature of the original with what shock of every step, supporting our posture, keeping he describes as a “monstrous effort” of handwork our footing sure and in firm contact with the ground.