An Ecstatic Experience, 2015

Miami Beach 2018
An Ecstatic Experience

galerie frank elbaz

Video/Film
Film; 6 minutes
The six-minute-long film An Ecstatic Experience is an experimental meditation on transcendence by the young artist Ja’Tovia Gary. Employing recuperated archival material, montage editing, and analogue animation techniques, her films examine the legacy of resistance and posit the numinous and the ritualistic as legitimate methods of liberatory action. The artist is concerned with the intimacy generated by repetitive mark making on the surface of the filmstock. Notions of women’s work, craft, and gendered labor practices inform the analogue direct animation technique used frequently in Gary’s filmmaking practice. Her preoccupation with temporal and spatial slippages as well as the reclamation of iconic historical events drive her investment in the archive. With the goal of reimagining the Black figure within the moving image, the feminine subjective gaze is rearticulated to invoke a multivalent interiority.