Steffani Jemison


under construction
I am a bag of blood, a sack of flesh, a wind machine, a drone, a droid, a bellows, a valve, a compression, an expansion, a continuous draft, not clever enough, immoderate, unreasonable, foolish. I am a fool?

 


Tumbler, 2021. Aluminum, electric gear motor, belt, 3D printed nylon, rubber, PET, stones, coins, glass, water, ceramic media, grit, and soap, 17 x 17 x 10 inches. Courtesy of the artist, Kai Matsumiya, New York, and Annet Gelink Gallery, Amsterdam. 












Installation view. The Great Migration: A Movement in Every Direction. Mississippi Museum of Art (2022). 






















Untitled (Ripple). 25’ x 106’. Decomissioned curtains and canvas flats. Installation view, Counterpublic 2023, St. Louis Union Station, St. Louis, MO, USA.
Steffani Jemison, A Rock, A River, A Street. 154 pages. 5 x 7.25 inches. Primary Information: New York, NY. Edition of 2000. Paperback. October 2022.


In college, the narrator briefly studied dance, which Jemison describes beautifully in flashbacks, the narrator’s memories of movement speaking to her ache to run again: “the inevitability of our desire—it felt like a spiral, like a helix from my core right into the universe.” A serendipitous dip into a Zumba class at the YMCA offers her a glimpse of new beginnings (“They were getting down in a way that, for me, required a few drinks and the cover of darkness”), and makes palpable the narrator’s yearning to express herself. It’s compulsively readable.

—Publisher’s Weekly











  Jemison’s films are alienating precisely to the extent that they draw our attention to everyday gestures as performance, a project that is ultimately ethical and linked to how we know and act with bodies in relation to other bodies.   [...]  In decomposing the very idea of a neutral body, On Similitude draws a body in.

—Lindsey Reckson, “On Similitude”  


Studio diary