ABSTRACT
“Do what?” speaks the collapsed subject. Rise again, midway through a tangible loop. Respond again to the textual transformation. Untitled/POW is a body forward meditation on repetitive movements and recurring powers. It draws a relationship between the ‘act of writing’ and the ‘out-of-frame’ forces that are given voice, as well as the ambiguous violence this tension enacts on the affected subject. Beginning in a cloud of palimpsest, the video enters a performative space that bears the remainder of inscription and erasure. Is the text effecting the collapse? Substituting for a body of control? Or, in fact, is it a revelation? Video still from ‘Pow’ by Emily Roysdon https://s3-euw1-ap-pe-df-pch-content-public-p.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/9781003421795/49a8d813-b939-4949-a7d7-299514d8dcb0/content/fig_510.jpg" xmlns:xlink="https://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"/>
Emily Roysdon is a Los Angeles- and New York-based interdisciplinary artist whose projects engage language and memory. Imaging collectivity and communicability as metonymic structures, her projects try to simultaneously exhibit ecstatic resistance and structural collapse. She is also an editor and cofounder of LTTR, a feminist genderqueer artist collective with a flexible project-oriented practice. LTTR produces an annual independent art journal, performance series, events, screenings, and collaborations. Roysdon’s work has been shown at Freedom Salon, Deitch Projects, New York; MIT List Visual Art Center, Cambridge; Longwood Arts Project, Bronx; The Kitchen, New York; Art in General, New York; and Contemporary Art Centre, Vilnius, Lithuania. Roysdon completed the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program in 2001 and an interdisciplinary M.F.A. at the University of California Los Angeles in 2006.
