I had the opportunity to interview artist Suné Woods about her commissioned video performance Suite Number Seven (2020), which will appear in the group exhibition Eco-Urgency: Now or Never in late August 2021. Suite Number Seven (4 min. 28 sec., 2020) is Woods’s commissioned contribution to Meshell Ndegeocello’s project, Chapter & Verse: The Gospel of James Baldwin (a co-production of Bismillah, LLC & Fisher at Bard; co-commissioned by Live Arts Bard, UCLA’s Center for the Art of Performance, The Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Kenny Leon’s True Colors Theatre, and Festival de Marseille). The performance appears at the end of the interview.
Rich Blint: The music of Meshell Ndegeocello and Justin Hicks is powerfully effective in Suite Number Seven (2020). Could you speak about the genesis of the collaboration and how you understand the sonic and the visual working together in the piece?
Suné Woods: Meshell reached out to invite me to create a visual testimony for Chapter & Verse: The Gospel of James Baldwin and gave me access to her project No More Water. I kept revisiting “Down at the Cross.” I felt it pondered what it means to traverse this realm, and spoke about the forced termination of breath, the taking of a human life, and holds those who believe they are innocent accountable. I created the visuals with the lyrics of “Down at the Cross” moving through me and fell into what needed to be said in a visual tongue.
RB: From the outset of this multivalent performance work, you indict the viewer, asking: how do we allow our neighbor to be precarious and at large in this hostile world? Could you share more about the conceptual, performative, and ethical imperatives at play here?
SW: We have the ability to unravel the belief that we are separate from those who are suffering and to be more compassionate with sharing our resources. The housing crisis in LA is growing more exponential. Interconnectedness between species is also a theme moving through the work, as well as tender exchanges between youth, and as coded vernacular in the movement of the land-water creature.
This piece was created in October 2020 while most of Los Angeles was shut down, so the energy of the time is embedded in the work.
RB: The movement language and syntax deployed at particular moments of the piece are quite effective. Could you say more about that embodied grammar, as well as the uniqueness and interconnectivity between humans and other species you’re clearly interested in exploring?
SW: Traveling beyond this dimension is both an act of survival and a strategy to heal what one experiences in the 3rd [dimension] and in the body. The performers are articulating this multi-dimensional movement.
Salt water is healing, it cleanses the heart, and is believed to be where ancestors reside. Sea creatures and animals can aid in our healing. The sea lions in my work live in La Jolla Cove. It is magical to swim inches away from them. It reminds me that I am in their home, that mythological hierarchies are hurting all of us, that the accumulation of trash and pollutants, which humans dump, returns to us as toxicity within our own flesh.
RB: The terrain in the early part of the piece works with those interspersed, flickering images, (and that stunning young woman with mirroring glasses and propeller hands), to invite the viewer to trouble temporal stasis and imagine a kind of Afro-future as a necessary space to conjure and navigate given the contemporary crisis. Am I reading this somewhat correctly?
SW: Travel is a conduit for evolution, moving energy, physically moving or traveling beyond the body, astrally, clearing what may be harbored ancestrally or karmically.
What you articulate is what feels urgent: to connect to the wisdom that we carry within our cells, the knowing that comes through Spirit, the language that moves through the architecture of our movement and dance.
Suné Woods, Suite Number Seven (4 min. 28 sec., 2020) is Woods’s commissioned contribution to Meshell Ndegeocello’s project, Chapter & Verse: The Gospel of James Baldwin (a co-production of Bismillah, LLC & Fisher at Bard; co-commissioned by Live Arts Bard, UCLA’s Center for the Art of Performance, The Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Kenny Leon’s True Colors Theatre, and Festival de Marseille).
Suné Woods is an artist living in Los Angeles. Her work takes the form of video installations, photographs, movement, and collage. Her work was exhibited in Made in L.A. 2018 curated by Anne Ellegood and Erin Christovale at the Hammer Museum. She has participated in residencies at Headlands Center of the Arts, Vermont Studio Center, The Center for Photography at Woodstock, and Light Work. Woods is a recipient of the 2020 Los Angeles Artadia Award, the Visions from the New California initiative, The John Gutmann Fellowship Award, and The Baum Award for an Emerging American Photographer. Woods has served as Visiting Faculty in the CalArts Photography & Media Program, Vermont College of Fine Arts Visual Art Program, Visiting Lecturer in the department of Art, Film, and Visual Studies at Harvard University, and is currently serving as Visiting Associate Professor at University of California Los Angeles in the department of Art.
