Blues\Blank\Black: Performance Art as Gesture, Color, Repetition, Archive

Abstract

The visual essay discusses the performance Blues\Blank\Black (2016) by the artist Dell M. Hamilton, engaged in dialogue with two novels by Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye (1970) and Beloved (1987). The performance grapples with individual and collective traumas and memories, with the failure to articulate the past and with the intergenerational impacts of experiences of violence against black women and girls. In three acts and by means of a superimposition, the artist evokes the folkloric and mythic figures of La Sucia and La Llorona of the popular oral traditions of Central America, and engages with the aesthetic effect of the color blue as a signifier for the orisha Yemayá. As part of an ongoing artistic research into the character of social violence, Blues\Blank\Black is a procedure of exaggeration, a hyperbole, as recognized in traumas, and it is a means to becoming aware of revived memories of past generations.