Steffani Jemison


under construction
Steffani Jemison, In Succession (Means), 2024. Performed by Nimia Gracious, Loren Tschannen and Steffani Jemison at Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève, June 7-8, 2024. Photo : Zoé Aubry. Image Description: Two performers engage with a sculpture consisting of metal pipes making a structure that resembles a jungle gym or scaffolding. One hangs upside down by their hands and feet from the frame, and the other sits watching, leaning against one of the pioes. At the edge of the shot an audience can be seen watching the performance.  


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?

 


Steffani Jemison, In Succession (Means), 2024. Performed by Nimia Gracious, Loren Tschannen and Steffani Jemison at Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève, June 7-8, 2024. Photo : Zoé Aubry.


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. 


WLD at Madragoa. Installation view. Photo by Bruno Lopes. Image description: A drawing on clear acrylic film, consisting of bold black marks, hangs over a white flat upright plinth. The plinth is kept upright by large metal brackets that brace the plinth against the ground. 
Installation shot ‘Decoders-Recorders’, a dual solo exhibition with Steffani Jemison and Samson Young, co-presented by De Appel and Looiersgracht 60. Photograph by LNDWstudio. Courtesy of Looiersgracht 60 / De Appel. Image description: A long table presenting an artwork on clear film sits in the center of a large room. Several other sculptural pieces also populate the room.
WLD at Madragoa. Installation view. Photo by Bruno Lopes. Image description: A drawing on clear acrylic film, consisting of bold black marks, hangs over a white flat upright plinth. The plinth is kept upright by large metal brackets that brace the plinth against the ground. 
Steffani Jemison, Same Time. Acrylic paint on clear polyester film. Iceberg Projects, 2018. Image description: A painting on clear film hanging on a white surface.

Installation shot ‘Decoders-Recorders’, a dual solo exhibition with Steffani Jemison and Samson Young, co-presented by De Appel and Looiersgracht 60. Photograph by LNDWstudio. Courtesy of Looiersgracht 60 / De Appel. Image description: In the foreground, a sculptural work comprised of two pieces of painted clear film propped up by a clear acrylic stand. In the background, a similar work.

Installation view: Steffani Jemison: End Over End, March 5 - August 8, 2021, Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati. Photo: Jesse Ly. Image description: In the foreground, small pieces of glass, rocks, and pennies sit on a low standing irregular shaped plinth. In the right background, a projection screen depicts an image of a woman reaching her arm beyond the bottom center of the frame.

Steffani Jemison and Jamal Cyrus, Alpha’s Bet is Not Over Yet. Installation view. Image description: People converge in groups in a reading room constructed inside a gallery. On the lefthand side of the room are shelves full of printed booklets. In the middle of the room are tables, and the righthand wall is dark blue and has a row of graphics hanging on it. 
Video still: Steffani Jemioson, Escaped Lunatic, 2011. Image description: A street view of a mural of Nelson Mandela and Barack Obama. The painting of Nelson Mandela is not finished being filled in. A woman and her child walk off the left side of the shot in front of the mural. 

Performance documentation, Recitatif (To signal a gathering). Jessica Silverman Gallery, San Francisco, CA (2019). Featuring Keith Jackson. Image description: In the foreground, a man reading music from a music stand plays violin as a woman sitting across from him looks at him and at a music stand; her hand is on a keyboard. In the background, several people watch.







Steffani Jemison, Bound, 2024. Installation view. Image Description: A large flat screen television is suspended from out of frame. On the screen a man’s feel can be scene launching out of the edge of the shot, with the Chicago skyline behind him and the word skybound superimposed overtop. Behind the flatscreen is a large theatrical curtain, with a painterly depiction of clouds. 


Steffani Jemison, In Succession (Means), 2024. Performed by Nimia Gracious, Loren Tschannen and Steffani Jemison at Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève, June 7-8, 2024. Photo : Zoé Aubry. Image description:  Three performers can be seen entertwined, tow are supporting the other just above the ground.   They are inside of a sculpture of metal pipes.  


Steffani Jemison, In Succession (Means), 2024. Performed by Nimia Gracious, Loren Tschannen and Steffani Jemison at Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève, June 7-8, 2024. Photo : Zoé Aubry. Image Description: Two performers interact with a sculpture made of metal pipes. One hangs from their knees on a pipe, while the other supports their body from below. The room is bright and there are many windows behind the performers, and audience members can be seen in the background. 


Installation view. The Great Migration: A Movement in Every Direction. Mississippi Museum of Art (2022). Image Description: A film plays on projection wall in a dark room. The scene depicts two women sitting in front of a painted backdrop. 





Steffani Jemison at 2220. Screening, Reading, & Conversation with Taylor Renee Aldridge. Image Description: Steffani Jemison and Taylor Renee Aldridge sit in chairs on a stage. Both women are holding microphones and are angled towards each other in conversation.  




Installation view, CLOSER at Kunstverein Dusseldorf. Photo by Cedric Mussano. Image description: A viewing room is constructed from 3 false walls inside a larger gallery. There is a video projected onto the center wall of the viewing room. The video shows a womans face and part of her torso upside down in the bottom right corner of the screen. 


Steffani Jemison, Toss, installation views at Annet Gelink Gallery, Amsterdam, NL, 2022. Curtesy the artist and the gallery. Photo by Michel Claus. Image Description: Image depicts a darkened room, in the background there is a film playing on a projection wall. The film depicts a scene of a park with trees sideways with irregular shapes framing the shot. In the foreground is a low irregularly shaped white plinth with small objects on it, including glass, stone, and metal. 


Steffani Jemison, "In Succession 2019". Installation view, In Between Days, Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY, 2021. Image description: In the foreground a projector sits on a cart next to a white pillar. In the background a projection screen depicts a black and white split-screen image. The left image is the top of a man's head, where the top back corner of the head touches the bottom center of the screen. The right image is a close up of an arm clad in a white shirt, bent slightly, where the shoulder is on the left side of the image and the arm extends past the right side of the frame.



Steffani Jemison, Greene Naftali: Steffani Jemison, 2021. Installation view. 




Installation view, Maison d'Art Bernard Anthonioz, 2017. 


Sensus Plenior. Installation view, Maison d'Art Bernard Anthonioz (2017). Image desciption: A gallery with a bench in front of a projection screen. On the screen is a woman with clown makeup sitting in front of a mirror with her mouth agape.


Video still: Steffani Jemison, Escaped Lunatic (2011). Image is full color, slightly grainy, and shows a man in a white tee shirt running away from the camera between large cement columns. The ground is grassy. 

Untitled (Ripple). 25’ x 106’. Decomissioned curtains and canvas flats. Installation view, Counterpublic 2023, St. Louis Union Station, St. Louis, MO, USA. Image Description: In the foreground a woman is pushing a stroller with a baby in it, she is blurry due to motion. In the background a high wall is covered in various theatrical stage drapes in colors blue, black and grey, including one that is a frame of feathers. 


Steffani Jemison, Bound, 2024. Installation view. 
Steffani Jemison, Bound, 2024. Installation view. Image Description: Metal pipes painted with sparing blue paint are arranged to form a jungle-gym like structure. A brass pole is mounted diagonally from the structure, and a drawing on glass hangs from the brass pole. There is another, larger drawing on glass inside the sculpture leaning against the pipes. 

Like many haunting stories, the Ancient Greek myth of Icarus is irreducibly linked to the question of freedom. Imprisoned on Crete, Icarus attempted escape on wax wings, which melted when he flew too close to the sun, sending him plummeting into the sea. His death was an accident, but it can be likened to the many thousands of drownings driven by a devastating intention: those of captive Africans who, seeking deliverance from slave ships, plunged themselves into the Atlantic Ocean.

—Zoë Hopkins, “Steffani Jemison’s Mythos of Fugitivity,” Frieze

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


Sensus Plenior. Installation view, Maison d'Art Bernard Anthonioz (2017). Image desciption: A gallery with a bench in front of a projection screen. On the screen is a woman with clown makeup sitting in front of a mirror with her mouth agape.






Lorem 
Video still: Steffani Jemison, Similitude (2019). Image description: A black and white video still depicts a blurry shot of man laying on the ground in what looks like an empty dance studio. His body is distorted by a seam in the mirror through which the shot is filmed. 

  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”  
Video still: Steffani Jemison, Similitude (2019). Image description: A black and white video still depicts a man stretching his mouth open with a fearful expression as he looks into a mirror.



Untitled, 2021. Acrylic, tempered glass table top, hardware. 59"H x 30"W x .5"D. Two drawings on glass sit side by side on low white pedestals, leaning against a white wall.



Steffani Jemison: Plant you now, dig you later. MASS MoCA, 2017. Image description: A gallery, on the righthand wall is a yellow neon work that reads "REVELATION." On the left side of the image is a wall of windows and a person standing next to a bench.



Studio diary