For Art Basel Paris, Madragoa is delighted to present a new installation conceived by Steffani Jemison (b. 1981, Berkeley, California, USA).

What is a leap of faith? How are flight, faith, and freedom connected? Weaving diverse historical and cultural traditions into a single body of work, this presentation of drawings and lenticular prints explores the connection of body and spirit through imagery of flight.

Using movement and language as tools for material and spiritual research, Jemison’s interdisciplinary practice explores themes of possibility, perspective, proximity, and understanding. Often centering black American cultural forms, Jemison searches for connections across diverse historical, cultural, and artistic contexts, returning again and again to the title “Same Time” to evoke insights that cross boundaries of time and space. In this presentation, Jemison connects the image of a wheel “way in the middle of the air” from black American song traditions to her ongoing exploration of the myth of Icarus, using these disparate symbols of flight to explore our ongoing desire for freedom in the face of impossible conditions.

Historians link the traditional African American song “Ezekiel Saw the Wheel” — referring to a biblical vision in which four wheels appear in the sky — to African religious symbols featuring similar circular forms. Jemison’s drawings in silver on glass, entitled Untitled (Same Time / way in the middle of the air), are inspired by these deeply interconnected traditions. The drawings, created by chemically etching on glass hand-silvered by the artist, evoke representations of the day and night skies while integrating cosmograms — spiritual writing forms — found in present-day Central Africa and the Caribbean. As installed, Jemison’s circular forms seem to be in orbit: perhaps they are wheels of salvation or redemption, symbolising the path to freedom and the faith in it.

Other works in the presentation explore flight through an ambiguous image: a figure suspended mid-air, perhaps caught flying or falling. The image of a body floating in space, without a horizon line for orientation, is found in representations of Icarus from Matisse to the present. The Untitled (Same Time / How else will I) lenticular prints recompose Jemison’s own video stills of acrobats mid-tumble. Characterised by their monochromatic palette, the works evoke a sense of melancholy that resonates with the themes explored in the context of Icarus’ myth. These themes pertain to the human condition, our inherent inability to fly in tension with the potential for liberation through this very act.

The medium of the lenticular print, which collapses multiple temporal moments in a single object, represents an expansion to a new medium in the artist’s longstanding research on bodies and their languages, gestures, and movements. Playing with the illusion of movement and depth, each lenticular print is simultaneously a still and a moving image, prompting a response from the viewer’s body as they physically navigate the work.

The drawings and lenticular photographs are situated within a found canvas cyclorama, painted to resemble the sky. Typically situated in the rear of a theatrical stage to evoke infinity, in this installation the cyclorama serves as the open-ended ground within which the drawings and photographs in this presentation float. The use of lenticular printing and of the cyclorama also reveals the artist’s fascination with the history of moving images, perspective, and vision as embodied phenomena. Recurrent in her video work are references to silent film or mime, both characterized by the emphasis on bodily expression, and whose tropes, rhythms and narrative devices are part of the artist’s vocabulary.

Jemison’s installation takes viewers on a journey in which the concept of freedom is embodied in the act of flight, which is shown with its variations, risks, and illusions.