Hawk,Ryan_ThisWaryWayofWalking_Still_2020

Film Screening: Tay Butler, Ryan Hawk, Stephanie Concepcion Ramirez

Thursday, November 4, 2021

FotoFest invites you to a screening featuring films that explore relationships between the construction of sociopolitical narratives and subjective accounts and experiences by three artists featured in the exhibition In Place of an Index.

Tay Butler’s MILien (2021) is an essay film that examines the ways popular media reflects, effects, and informs the historization of Black life and Black experiences in America. By juxtaposing images collected during a road-trip to visit his ancestorial home of Alligator, Mississippi with archival footage sourced from hip-hop videos, news media, body cams, and documentation of civil rights speeches, Butler links images of Black social life with images and audio that describe hostile cultural and political conditions that underpin the American landscape.

Ryan Hawk’s ...this wary way of walking (2020) examines the subcultural practice of mudding (an off-road sport of operating all-terrain vehicles in mud) through the lens of social privilege and psychosexual performance. Hawk’s film positions the act of mudding as one of self-abjection and embodied appropriation: the soiling of oneself to co-opt a marginalized subject position. By appropriating tropes and methods from cinema, pop culture, and literary theory, the film works to satirize and disorder notions of universal sovereignty and self-determination in direct response to white, cis heteropatriarchal ideology, histories, and forms of expression.

Stephanie Concepcion Ramirez’s Untitled (2021) is a single-channel film featuring a series of recorded conversations between the artist and individuals invited to see the artist's work in person. The interviews are used as a springboard to larger conversations from different perspectives about the themes included art, theory, migration, family, story-telling and history. Individuals who are featured in the film are friends, colleagues, and mentors that Ramirez has had the privilege of working alongside since moving to the greater Houston area as well as those who make up my community outside of an arts context. 

About the artists

Tay Butler is a multi-disciplinary artist based in Houston, TX, while teaching and studying in Fayetteville, AR. Currently an MFA candidate of the University of Arkansas’ Photography and Studio Art program, he received his BFA in Photography and Digital Media from the University of Houston. Tay's work utilizes photography, collage, video, music, installation and performance to identify and confront history, migration, memory and identity. He begins with literature, folklore, national and local media, ephemera and historical documents. This content is then digitized, photographed, cut, clipped, extended, collaged, shrunk, enlarged, exposed, uncovered, repeated or redacted and placed into a new context. Constructing revisionist histories that are fictional but true, authentic yet imagined, the stories and scenes created act like braids and weave together a rich tapestry that can last longer than human memory. 

Stephanie Concepcion Ramirez is a Salvadoran-American artist from Prince George's County, Maryland. She has had the privilege to attain her BFA at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, VA and her MFA at the University of Texas at Austin. Ramirez’ practice combines the language of photography with site-specific installations and text. Her work is based on notions of memory, personal and historical amnesia that trace the veins of the Central American diaspora. In an attempt to reconcile with her personal and cultural histories and memories, she creates work to validate truth, false memories, filtered history and fantasy. Ramirez currently works and lives in Pearland, Texas.

Ryan Hawk is a visual artist using video, sculpture, and site-specific installation to imagine alternative corporealities and forms of embodiment. Hawk has presented solo exhibitions at Gray Contemporary, Lawndale Art Center, The Umlauf Sculpture Garden and Museum, and The Museum of Human Achievement. His work has also been included in group exhibitions, screenings, and festivals such as Perform Chinatown, Los Angeles; Grace Exhibition Space, Brooklyn; the Museum of Fine Arts in Nagoya, Japan; Jonathan Hopson Gallery, Houston; and many more. Notable awards include an SMFA Traveling Fellowship, The Arch and Anne Giles Kimbrough Fund from the Dallas Museum of Art, and a two-year fellowship with the Core Residency Program at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Hawk holds a BFA in studio art from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and an MFA in studio art from the University of Texas at Austin.

Image: Ryan Hawk, ...this wary way of walking (still), 2020. 4K video, color, sound, 10:40 minutes. Courtesy of the artist.