2004-2005, video, color, silent
Curated by David Everitt Howe
Washington Square Park
9PM

Focusing attention on the performative potential of bodies and their relation to each other in space, Roysdon’s Social Movement gathers several participants to, in the artist’s words, “simultaneously create and perform the stage.” Constructing a tableau of slowly shifting and repeating gestures and poses, memory is relied upon to engender social movement, participation, and collective action.

Emily Roysdon is a New York and Stockholm based artist and writer. Roysdon completed the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program in 2001 and an Interdisciplinary MFA at UCLA in 2006. For six months in 2008 she was a resident at the International Artists Studio Program in Sweden (IASPIS). Recent solo shows include new commissions from Art in General (NY), Konsthall C (Stockholm) and a Matrix commission from the Berkeley Art Museum. Her videos have been screened widely and her writings have been published in numerous books and magazines, including the Journal of Aesthetics and Protest, Zehar, C Magazine, and Women & Performance: a Journal of Feminist Theory.

Built on a former military parade ground, Washington Square Park has been the site of many a political protest, from women’s suffrage to the Beatnik Riot of 1961, when the city arrested musicians and other “undesirable” bohemians rallying in the park. More recently, Washington Square Park was the site of Occupy Wall Street protests when demonstrators were expelled from Zuccotti Park.