Celebrate the opening of Vanessa German’s MATRIX 174 exhibition, “i come to do a violence to the lie,” on Wednesday, June 8, 2016 at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art. German — sculptor, actress, playwright, and educator — will perform her unique style of Spoken Word Opera, a vibrant hybrid of spoken word poetry combining the theatrical elements of Hip Hop, African Storytelling, and Opera.
For MATRIX 174, German will transform the gallery into an underground site resembling an excavated cavern. Several strings of exposed light bulbs will offer minimal illumination to a powerful army of approximately 30 of German’s black figurative sculptures, which will be installed in military formation on an earthen floor. German’s soldiers confront the agents of racism, violence, and police brutality. In her signature prose, she describes them as “an army of healers, an army of weepers, an army of protectors, armed and dangerous upon the lie.”
German creates inspiring sculptures in the tradition of African ‘Nkisi’ power figures, divine protective objects heavily encrusted with nails, beads, shells, and found objects that evoke suits of armor. Housing mystical forces to eradicate evil, German’s enigmatic contemporary variations of these ritualistic sculptures embody a performative, spiritual, and affirming function.
[sic] …one of my favored images from the last studio-move-to-truck. i am thinking about how my ancestors like the quiet. Feeling like there iz a lot of noise. in our world. somehow like trees in skirts I imagine them breathing like gravity. our ancestor’s deep respirations holding our feet to this wet planet of fire and rock [sic]. Vanessa German