When you step into the latest exhibit at Video Pool in the Exchange District, you are immediately wrapped in a euphoric delirium of dance sounds and pulsating lights. Archival footage of queer dance spaces in Chicago and New York flow around you, and you cannot help but be swept up in the energy.
At the same time, still landscapes images form a backdrop for those looking to visually escape the twisting bodies on the dance floor; landscape images that look vaguely familiar but vibrate with neon pinks and whites instead of natural greens and blues.
This confluence of curated culture and imagined openness is World Building as Radical Imagination, the culmination of two different projects by artists Mahlet Cuff and Evan Tremblay created in Assocation with TakeHome Art House. The former is responsible for the collection of dance videos and music that represent the social nature of what they call a “queer Black utopia” in a piece called "I wanna be able to dance (on my own terms)". Meanwhile, Tremblay (an apprentice to a harvester at the base of the Duck Mountains in western Manitoba) provides images of a place is possible for people to create a safe space free of appropriation with his work, "The HBC GTE-10,000".
“I think at the forefront of what I’m thinking through is thinking about other Black queer people who are trying to reimagine themselves within a prairie landscape,” says Cuff, who was partly inspired to create their piece as an accessible response to not feeling completely at home in their home city of Winnipeg.
“I also often ask the question of like, how can heaven – or like, this idea of heaven – can be accessible to people, and I want everyone to consider what are the privileges, what are the disadvantages, what are the limitations, what are the endless possibilities.”
Cuff learned and utilized a computer program called MadMapper to help capture these endless possibilities. Tremblay, meanwhile, used a program called TouchDesigner to process the videos he captured in western Manitoba through a feedback look to harvest their ethereal, utopic effects.
While Tremblay himself is white, he notes that his images blend with Cuff’s to help enhance the idea of a utopia that they both can inhabit. “I think that tension came from seeing our own utopias beside each other, realizing that the breaking up and bleeding together speaks more truly to the vision behind them.”
Tremblay observes that the collaborative nature of this utopia is ultimately what makes it utopic: a place where shared ideas can coexist in harmony and understanding. “You have to have your own thoughts on the work you produce, you have your own understanding of it,” he says, “but in showing work, I think the focus on it should be the showing of the work itself and allowing others to see it.”
Cuff hopes that when audiences see the work, they feel a mixture of joy and responsibility. “Responsibility, I think, is super important, especially in the times that we’re currently living in,” they say, noting that the piece invites people to consider how they are taking responsibility in the world around them.
“Audre Lorde would often ask the question of... ‘I’m a Black lesbian mother, breast cancer survivor. I’m doing my work. What’s yours?’” they continue. “I think that question is what I'm asking people in that room.”
Audiences can interact with World Building as Radical Imagination at Video Pool until May 9. The exhibit is open from Wednesday through Friday from 1 to 5 p.m. More information can be found at Video Pool’s website.
