Chicago Artists Coalition is pleased to present Repository and Repertoire, a duo exhibition featuring new works by HATCH Residents Jazmine Harris and José Santiago Pérez. The exhibition will have an opening day on Friday, January 29, 2021, by appointment only, from 3-8pm. Please reserve your time here.

Repository and Repertoire stages a conversation between the archival processes of Jazmine Harris and the haptic choreographies of José Santiago Pérez. They arrange and compose images, objects, attitudes, and issues that articulate historical and social, collective, and individual relationships between local knowledge and global narratives.

Repository refers to cultural events that are preserved permanently, such as in writing, photographs, or recorded tapes, in archives, libraries, and collections and, therefore, are perceived as stable and unchanging over time. Through the collage of monoprints, news headlines, and photos from her personal archive, Harris repositions photography’s connection to time as a referent to create new relationships to memory.

Repertoire applies to a culture embodied in the practices of such events as rituals and dances; they follow a script but are perceived as temporary, fragile, and easily forgotten. Pérez reworks traditional basket weavings through performative processes to build a language between time, value, and touch.

Although archival and embodied knowledges seem to work in opposition, these two ways of knowing illuminate and invigorate one another. Questioning not only what we know but also challenging us on how we know it. Harris and Pérez ask:

How do you acknowledge, visualize, write, perform, practice, and enact? How do you know, store, and transmit?

Repository and Repertoire is curated by Stephanie Koch.

Public Events

Revision — Exhibiting artist Jazmine Harris will be in conversation with curator Stephanie Koch alongside artists Sasha Phyars-Burgess and Cameron A. Granger. Through a discussion of Black visualities, they will discuss their recent shifts in making to create new ways to disseminate and care for images of Black life. The recorded conversation and a transcription will be posted for viewing at repositoryandrepertoire.com on February 1st and available throughout the month of February.

Rehearsal — Through a series of four weekly open rehearsals, José Santiago Pérez will share the making of a new performative work Unburdenings. Alongside their collaborators, Pérez will build a range of movements and gestures which both ask and seek to answer: How do we bear emotional, mental, and social burdens? Where do we store those burdens in the body? In what ways do we share the weight of burdens through our relations?

Rehearsals will be live-streamed at 1 PM CST every Sunday from February 7 - February 28, 2021 at repositoryandrepertoire.com

On Sunday, March 14, 2021, at 1 PM CST, exhibiting artist José Santiago Pérez will be in conversation with curator Stephanie Koch on the collaborative process of choreographing Unburdenings. This conversation will be available via live stream and hosted at repositoryandrepertoire.com

This program is partially supported by a grant from the Illinois Arts Council, a state agency.

Image (from left to right): Jazmine Harris, Untitled (detail), 2020, collage on paper; José Santiago Pérez (so you may ease...)(detail), 2020, coiled emergency blankets and plastic lacing.