Apr 9, 2015

New York–based artist Maya Ciarrocchi has created videos and projection design for Merce Cunningham, Ping Chong, Bebe Miller, and Donna Uchizono, among others, as well as for regional theaters around the country. Most recently, she designed the video projections for Carmen de Lavallade ‘s one-woman show, “As I Remember It” at Baryshnikov Arts Center.

New York–based artist Maya Ciarrocchi has created videos and projection design for Merce Cunningham, Ping Chong, Bebe Miller, and Donna Uchizono, among others, as well as for regional theaters around the country. Most recently, she designed the video projections for Carmen de Lavallade ‘s one-woman show, “As I Remember It” at Baryshnikov Arts Center.

Ciarrocchi’s video installations and single-channel works feature interviews, life-sized durational portraits, and environmental documentation; they invite viewers to contemplate assumptions about communities, individuals, and how identity is constructed. Her subjects have included coal-mining communities in West Virginia (“Overburden”), former ultra-Orthodox Jews who have left their religion (“Frei”), and, the New York dance and performance community in “I’m Nobody, Who Are You?”

She first experimented with video portraiture working on “Necessary Beauty” with Bebe Miller. Prerecorded portraits of the performers were paired and then played in conjunction with voice-over text that didn’t necessarily match the individual portrait.

 Ciarrocchi found when shooting these portraits over the course of just a minute, the subjects would subtly shift their emotional response. The more vulnerable they became in front of the camera, the more viewers could begin to create a narrative. She connects this to her background in dance, and how looking at bodies moving in space creates narratives. There is a design aspect—the shapes the bodies are forming in negative and positive space and were the intersections are—and then there’s how each individual dancer embodies the same space.

 For her durational portraiture, she shoots her subjects for 10 minutes, ample time to deal with the comfort / discomfort of having to look at the camera lens directly throughout. Rather then asking her subjects to stare at the camera, she asks them to consider their future viewer.

 In “Gender/Power (composition II),” which Ciarrocchi developed in residency at BAC along with collaborator Kris Grey, a video installation featuring three side-by-side durational portraits precedes the entrance of the performing bodies; they appear to inhabit the same space, unaware of each other. The performance also utilizes a combination of full body video portraiture and a distillation of close-up and re-framings, postural and gestural aspects of gender performance condensed or extracted into performative actions.

 While in residency at BAC, as the team began braiding the text, they returned to an original concept of the work, about transposition—of stories, bodies, and image. Ciarrocchi began to layer the portraits she had shot in a variety of ways so that parts of the image could be seem through other parts, and as subjects move, the image completely shifts. The visuals reflect and offer an unpacking of what’s being said in the text.

 Both Grey and Ciarrocchi are interested in revealing how particular ideologies are lived, performed, or transcribed onto the body. “Gender/Power” examines the subject of gender and authority by making visible the personal narratives of performers who have made specific decisions to disrupt or subvert gender signifiers. At its core, “Gender/Power” is about how we make snap judgments about people because we don’t really take the time to actually look at them, beyond skin deep.