Alexis Blake
Alexis Blake (1981, born in the USA, lives and works in Amsterdam) combines visual arts and performance in her work. Her projects often involve extensive research beforehand, for example on the way in which women or the ideal body are portrayed and given meaning, or the way in which anger and empathy are manifested physically. Blake usually begins with a broad research question, which is gradually explored until it becomes more concrete, and which she subsequently translates into performance, choreography, texts, video or sculpture, or a combination of these.
In 2016, Alexis Blake presented a performance entitled Allegory of the Painted Woman in the Gallery of Honour at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. Accompanied by four musicians, two professional dancers repeatedly assumed the well-known classical poses that we are familiar with from the history of art, those of the woman as seductress, mother, martyr, prostitute or saint. Her performance, which took place among the 17th century masterpieces in the Gallery of Honour, tersely criticises the white male perspective that dominates in the history of art.
In her project Anger/Empathy (2017-2018), Blake examined how our body serves as an archive, as a repository for emotions. Through the body and voice, she subsequently explored the influence of cultural and historical factors on the way anger and empathy is felt. Gender, race, class, nationality and religion (and all of the intersections between them) play an important role in the way in which emotions are expressed or, in fact, repressed. In this way it is often regarded as inappropriate for women to show anger, an emotion that people are quick to label as ‘hysteria’. Social codes, systems and mechanisms of representation and ‘subjectification’ are what interest Blake.
In her most recent work, crack nerve boogie swerve (2019), which she is currently presenting at TENT Rotterdam, Blake focuses on ‘breaking’: breaking through norms, breaking free from limitations and freeing yourself from what is holding you back. Together with a team of female dancers, singers and musicians, she examines the treatment and meaning of ‘breaking’ by working with sound, the human voice, and bodies, all in a sculptural setting that she has made from glass and concrete.