(DIS)FIGURATIONS: A Performative Lecture by lauren woods

In this performative artist lecture, lauren woods probes the construction of race in the white imaginary. A meditation on her lived experience as an artist, mother, and Black woman, this lecture is structured as a letter to herself and dissects the way language circumscribes subjectivity.

 

This program is presented in conversation with woods’ video (S)Port of San Francisco (2006), which is on view in the exhibition The Time. The Place. In this video, woods casts the gaze of her camera on a crowd of spectators who are watching a group of street performers at the Port of San Francisco, shifting the relationship and power dynamic between the viewer and viewed. Through this lecture, woods will trace the “ethno-fictive” impulse in her work, and her ongoing engagement with the dominant ideologies of “the black body” as a platform by which to examine the self-disfiguration of white psyche.  

 

lauren woods (U.S., born 1979) is a conceptual artist whose hybrid media projects—film, video and sound installations, public interventions and site-specific work—engage themes of historical justice and public memory, and examine invisible dynamics in society. Among her public works is Drinking Fountain #1, a new media monument to the American Civil Rights Movement located underneath the remnant of a recently rediscovered Jim Crow “White Only” sign. Based in Dallas, Texas, woods is a visiting lecturer at Southern Methodist University.