Humid Trance Distance, 2020–2021, directed by Wes Kline and Janelle Rebel, video performance project. Writing, performance scores, and choreography by Janelle Rebel. Shot, edited with music by Wes Kline. Performed by: Chelsea Bruner, Matthew Dalton, Eleanor Eichenbaum, Musa Kunene, Ro Maiti, Alé Salamán, and Michael Wyshock. Stills from single-channel video (above and below).
How do you signal shifts in the experience of social space—physical and psychological, individual and communal—during a pandemic? Humid Trance Distance, a video performance project by Janelle Rebel and Wes Kline, is driven by an impulse to unpack the new anxiety of bodily proximity in public space as well as to cultivate episodes of distanced togetherness in their community in southwest Florida. The performances are scored, rehearsed, and improvised on location for two to infinity performers and utilize momentary gestures, found and simple constructed objects, cyclical actions, and spatial geometries. The project investigates ideas about the hyperlocal, productive affect, and dispersive technologies through abstract movements—face, sync, pass, waterfall, meet, revolve, tether, intersect.
Awards/Exhibitions:
2021 Wheaton Biennial_final_final_FINAL, virtual exhibition curated by Legacy Russell, Beard and Weil Galleries, Wheaton College, Norton, Massachusetts, March 18–May 22, 2021 with opening reception on Monday, March 22, 5-7 pm.
Best in Show, Reality Shift, online exhibition curated by Brielle Jenkins, Mid-America College Art Association, March 20–August 31, 2021.
Uncompressed, campus installation, Rebecca Randall Bryan Art Gallery, Coastal Carolina University, Conway, South Carolina, Spring 2021.
Art in Isolation, virtual exhibition curated by HC Huỳnh, Art School Pedagogy 2.0, MICA & Teachers College at Columbia University, Macy Art Gallery, New York, March 27–April 30, 2021.
CICA Experimental Film and Video 2021, Czong Institute for Contemporary Art, Gimpo-si, Gyeonggi-do, Korea, June 30–July 18, 2021. (A video still from Humid Trance Distance is the cover of the exhibition catalog.)
