Tito's Prize 2021 Exhibition

We are the [Hackers], Baby, [Hackers] are we

Aryel René Jackson and Michael J. Love

October 23, 2021 – January 8, 2022

In We are the [Hackers], Baby, [Hackers] are we, Aryel René Jackson and Michael J. Love perform as their alter egos, Confuserella and Babé, and illustrate a Black futuristic location where wormholes serve as conduits between the present and past. The two hack a method for traversing time and imagining new sites for planting their loved ones’ histories. This is embedded in the work’s namesake, a hack of the debut single title from Real People, Chic’s 1980 album. We are the [Hackers], Baby, [Hackers] are we is made up of three components linked together through Jackson and Love’s collaborative process: personal and visual research become part of a live rhythm tap dance performance which is then captured and archived through a multi-camera setup.

In their previous video and performance work, Jackson and Love have ruminated on the relationship between cultural memory and familial legacy. In Descendance (2020), The Future Is A Constant Wake (2019), All I See Is Blue (2017-2018), and other works, soil continues to be featured as a significant medium for the artists’ performance-based practice of transforming generational knowledge into landscapes. Jackson and Love’s theoretical framework is largely inspired by Katherine McKittrick’s analysis of Black geographies and Saidiya Hartman’s method of “critical fabulation”—two Black feminist approaches for redressing the insufficiencies of institutional and cultural archives.

“Black geographies comprise philosophical, material, imaginary, and representational trajectories; each of these trajectories, while interlocking, is also indicative of multiscalar processes, which impact upon and organize the everyday.”

– Katherine McKittrick’s Demonic Grounds (2006)

“How can narrative embody life in words and at the same time respect what we cannot know? How does one listen for the groans and cries, the undecipherable songs, the crackle of fire in the cane fields, the laments for the dead, and the shouts of victory, and then assign words to all of it?

– Saidiya Hartman’s "Venus in Two Acts,” Small Axe (2008, 12:2)

Aryel René Jackson and Michael J. Love were unanimously selected as the 2021 Tito’s Prize recipient by a curatorial panel that includes Christopher Blay, Houston-based artist, writer, curator, and the Chief Curator of the Houston Museum of African American Culture; Lise Ragbir, Independent Curator and Writer; and Coka Treviño, Curator and Director of Programming at Big Medium.

Tito's Prize 2021 Exhibition
October 23, 2021 – January 8, 2022

Aryel René Jackson (b. 1991) is a Black film-based artist whose practice considers land and landscape as sites of internal representation. Themes of transformation are embedded in their interest and application of repurposed imagery and objects, video, sound, and performance. Exploring how culture is inherited, Jackson modifies familial and antique farming, household, and educational tools and furniture, hacking each object's purpose and meaning with nature-based material and weather based icons. They were born in Louisiana and raised there with their maternal family who descend from generations of farmers. Jackson currently lives and works in Austin, TX where they teach Expanded Media I at The University of Texas at Austin (Alum '19). Jackson is an alum of the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (2019), Royal College of Art Exchange Program (2018), and The Cooper Union (2013). Their work has been shown nationally at various galleries and institutions such as the Dallas Contemporary (2021); Jacob Lawrence Gallery, Seattle (2021); Contemporary Art Center, New Orleans (2018); Depaul Art Museum, Chicago (2018); Rhode Island School of Design Museum (2017); and Studio Museum in Harlem (2016).

arielrenejackson.com

Michael J. Love (b. 1987) is an interdisciplinary tap dance artist, scholar, and educator. He was recently announced as a 2021-2023 Princeton University Arts Fellow. His embodied research intermixes Black queer feminist theory and aesthetics with a rigorous practice that critically engages the Black cultural past as it imagines Black futurity. In Austin, his work has been supported and presented by Fusebox Festival, ARCOS Dance, Ground Floor Theatre, and The Cohen New Works Festival. He has received an Austin Critics’ Table Award and has been nominated for a B. Iden Payne Award. Love has also collaborated with film-based artist Aryel René Jackson on video and performance projects which have been featured in or programmed by The New York Times Style Magazine’s #TBlackArtBlackLife series, the New Museum and CUE Art Foundation in New York, the Galleries at the University of Northern Colorado, and the Jacob Lawrence Gallery at the University of Washington. Love's performance credits include the Broadway laboratory for Savion Glover and George C. Wolfe’s "Shuffle Along" and roles in works by Baakari Wilder. Love holds an M.F.A. in Performance as Public Practice from The University of Texas at Austin and is an alumnus of Emerson College.

dancermlove.com