Hieroglyphics of the Film: Stuplimity and Static in the Films of Ja'Tovia Gary

Abstract:This essay discusses film and video works of artist, Ja'Tovia Gary, focusing on the strategies she employs to address blackness as both sociopolitical narrative and a material quality of film. Gary's interaction with the staging of her experimental films and film as matter are historical and technical. Looking at the Giverny Suite films, I recount how the filmmaker encouraged her audience to move about the screening space during the opening night at Paula Cooper Gallery, February 2019. These films were projected onto the gallery walls giving them a monumental effect that I argue left the audience in a state of stuplimity, Sianne Ngai's term for the experience of the hybrid affective condition of stupor and the sublime that is common to the gallery and museum setting. The experience of stuplimity and the artist's response raise questions about blackness as narrative and a quality of the material substrate we call film. I then turn to Gary's earlier film, An Ecstatic Experience (2015) for a different example of the filmmaker's involvement in the sublime aspects found in archival footage of black theatrical performance and decaying film celluloid. In the film, Gary uses direct animation to draw onto archival footage of the television series, History of the Negro People, while also suturing Black Lives Matter street uprising television footage. These historical, social, and technical strategies mark film as a space and substance of care and caring, allowing us to consider the noise and signals of black lifeworlds in a way that accords with Michael Gillespie's account of "film blackness."