Ja’Tovia Gary’s radical Black feminist filmmaking

March 20, 2020

Ja’Tovia Gary, the Dallas-born filmmaker, has concurrent exhibitions at Paula Cooper and the Hammer Museum at UCLA. Filmed on location in Harlem, New York, and in Claude Monet’s historic gardens in Giverny, France, THE GIVERNY SUITE is a multi-textured cinematic poem that meditates on the safety and bodily autonomy of Black women. Gary unleashes an arsenal of techniques and materials, including direct animation on archival 16mm film, woman-on-the-street interviews, and montage editing, to explore the creative virtuosity of Black femme performance figures while interrogating the histories of those bodies as spaces of forced labor and commodified production.

Ja’Tovia Gary, THE GIVERNY SUITE (detail), 2019, film, 39:56 minutes, three-channel installation, stereo sound, HD and SD video footage, color/black & white, 1920 x 1080, 16:9 aspect ratio, dimensions variable, Edition of 5, +2 APs. Installation view, flesh that needs to be loved, Paula Cooper Gallery, New York, NY, February 15 – March 21, 2020. Photo: Steven Probert. © Ja’Tovia Gary. Courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, New York.

"The artist captures the breadth of Black womanhood in her video installation 'The Giverny Suite'

It is 1976 at the Montreux Jazz Festival in Switzerland. Nina Simone sits down at her piano to play Morris Albert’s easy listening dirge “Feelings.” In Ms. Simone’s hands, what was once a saccharine, hollow tune is now a mesmerizing piece of music with her virtuosic piano playing, asides to the audience, and thousand-yard stare.

“The footage of her performing in Montreux, this rendition of ‘Feelings,’ to me it’s just— it’s one of those videos that I would come back to, over and over again, throughout the years. Thank God for YouTube,” says filmmaker Ja’Tovia Gary in our recent correspondence. “It’s easy to dismiss it as, ‘Oh, she’s high, or she’s crazy,’ but to me, she’s engaging with the audience in a way that feels very sophisticated, and there’s an air of distance that is there. But she’s also not going to let you forget that she is brilliant.”

Nina Simone figures heavily in Gary’s newest work The Giverny Suite, a part of her show flesh that needs to be loved at Paula Cooper Gallery in New York. The acclaimed filmmaker’s immersive video installation slices and fuses footage of the aforementioned Montreux performance of Nina Simone with the artist at Claude Monet’s estate in Giverny, France, and interviews with Black women Gary meets on a street corner in Harlem. Drawing from her personal experiences and a wider cultural context, Gary’s films are an immersive, multi-faceted exploration of Black womanhood in America, exploring joy, love, and fear with equal amounts of care and consideration."— Madeleine Seidel, Mar. 20, 2020

This post is an excerpt. Read the full article on the Document Journal website.

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