ANY EXPERIENCE WITH MEN AND ALCOHOL
- >>> any experience with men and alcohol is a participatory performance about service and power.
Get tickets to the theatrical run at JACK: Thursday, May 29th - Saturday, May 31st
(Photography by Maria Baranova)
FABRIC SOFTENER
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>>> Fabric Softener is a theatrical response to Toni Morrison's novel Song of Solomon and the text's focus on three generations of Black women: Pilate, her daughter Reba, and granddaughter Hagar.
This performance presents three new characters who are not recreations of these women but are instead archetypes: The Laundress, The Celebrant, and The Witness. The performance begins as The Celebrant and The Witness prepare The Laundress for an intervention: a baptism, a becoming, and a funeral for what used to be and can no longer exist.
Premiered at The Shed (July 25th - July 27th, 2024)
Cast:
THE BODY SHOWS ITSELF
- >>> The structure of each performance was simple; viewers had the opportunity to photograph Stewart during a one-on-one experience that could last for any length of time determined by the viewer.
Each photograph produced reflects Stewart’s interpretation of an audience member's instructions. Titled with the initials of the anonymous participants, the photographs reflect the attention others paid to her body. Strangers documented her in 84 pieces, capturing her face, breasts, stomach, knees, toes, thighs, ass, and genitals: a once-over performed many times but always incomplete.
Performed at A.I.R. Gallery, The Watermill Center, and Satellite Art Show
DREAMGURL
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>>> dreamgurl features a series of self-portraits that explore the production and reproduction of sexually explicit images.
Stewart was inspired to begin this series after a video of her 2020 performance “La Négresse blanche,” which includes nudity, was downloaded by an anonymous Vimeo user named “J” and shared on various pornographic sites without her consent in February 2021.
Although Stewart had originally intended “La Négresse blanche” to be a commentary on double consciousness, internalized racism, and the epidermalization of whiteness, J had classified the work as masturbatory material and ironically distributed it as PAWG (phat ass white girl) porn. Notably, J exoticizes Stewart’s naked Black body by repeatedly drawing attention to her “dark and meaty cunt,” nipples, and “kitty.” Despite Stewart’s numerous attempts to regain control of the video, it continues to pop up on different sites every few months to this day.
After processing this violation, Stewart felt that she needed to reckon with the fact that her art can be classified as pornographic because it centers her naked body. Rather than disavow this designation, Stewart uses this series as an opportunity to explore the possibility of being a producer of pornographic images.
Stewart started collecting dozens of vintage 1980s Playboy magazines to study the physical language and gestures displayed in archetypal pornographic materials. Cutting out the bodies of white (and often highly bronzed and airbrushed) centerfold models, Stewart embarked on a mission to entirely cover her body in an assemblage of thousands of magazine clippings.
dreamgurl documents Stewart’s construction of garish Frankenstein-esque molds of her body, an act that took place across two days at the Institute for Electronic Arts. The messy performance incorporated honey, Q-tips, saliva, sweat, hair, and dirt.
Stewart used the photographs and videos from her durational performance to produce self-portraits of her face, chest, stomach, pubic area, thighs, and ass. The exhibition also includes a single remnant of the performance: one of the masks that was adhered to Stewart’s face. It sits in the gallery on a mirrored vanity table in front of a magnified scan of the object, becoming a metonym for the slippery, sinuous relationship between image and performance.
In dreamgurl, Stewart offers up abstracted flesh for consumption. She invites audiences to be unashamed about their voyeurism as they move through the gallery and delight in eyeing (and occasionally fingering or trying on) the collaged pieces. Yet, in this project of exposure, Stewart reveals herself on her own terms. Subverting general assumptions of the “nude selfie” by cloaking herself in images of others, Stewart largely keeps her own body hidden.
Solo exhibition at A.I.R. Gallery, Spring 2023
UNYIELDING
Asia Stewart performed “Unyielding” in response to Entang Wiharso’s exhibition When Rabbits Eat Meat at Marc Straus Gallery. In “Unyielding,” Stewart returns to Abel Meeropol’s haunting “Strange Fruit,” a song made popular by Billie Holiday. Stewart’s looped and improvised performance of “Strange Fruit” gives her the impetus to confront a Southern magnolia tree and investigate where histories of racial terror and violence reside in its soil, a direct reference to Wiharso's experience of seeing a tree in South Carolina that had been used for lynching, and likening it to the corpse flower, a recurring image in the works on view.
RETAIL THERAPY
Inspired by Man Ray’s “Obstruction,” Stewart created a dress made of translucent plastic hangers found in her childhood home. In performances of this work, she quickly constructed the sculpture and hung up clothing donated by audience members in the span of 15 - 20 minutes. During performances at The Tank and JACK, Stewart tried to challenge the capitalist desire to accumulate goods with the question: “why is it that we collect so many things?"
LET’S PLAY
Let’s Play explored how clothing (or its absence) is gendered and surveilled in public. Audience members had the ability to momentarily dictate how Stewart was dressed. Those who attended both virtually and in-person were directed to a Google Form that allowed them to decide whether she would add or remove a layer of clothing. Those anonymous responses were shared aloud via a digital program to instruct Stewart as to how she should proceed. The performance was live-streamed to let audience members view the impact that their commands had on the performance in real time. Over the course of four hours, audience members submitted over 300 commands. Stewart began the performance in approximately 30 layers of clothing. At many times during the performance, she was completely nude, and by its conclusion, Stewart wore nearly 50 layers of clothes.
GORGADES
In this piece, Stewart covers her entire body in dark, artificial hair purchased from a beauty supply store near her apartment in Brooklyn. While clothed in her dress of hair, Stewart performs normal tasks like braiding, tying, and combing her hair, and complete actions like sweeping the floor. Her performance, paired with audio taken from instructional etiquette tapes on hygiene, pokes fun at society’s anxious surveillance of body hair in the name of “cleanliness”, beauty, and femininity.
LEGS IS LEGS
In Legs is Legs, Stewart engaged in the reiterative practice of binding her body with nylon pantyhose to an ironing board. Through the act of restraining herself with accessories that are commonly used to keep the body “in line”, she attempted to physicalize the constraints that dictate how women can and should present their bodies to others. Bound by over 100 pairs of pantyhose, Stewart renders herself immobile. Her self-imposed entrapment represents the violence that’s enacted to uphold conceptions of gender.
LA NÉGRESSE BLANCHE
La Négresse blanche is a six hour performance that marks the beginning of Stewart's Graft series. The piece is titled after Mayotte Capecia’s book of the same name and draws off of selections from Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks. During the performance, a Black subject attempts to become white by covering herself in glue and paint. After waiting for the paste to dry, the subject strips off the glue and ingests bits of it. La Négresse blanche illustrates an epidermalization of whiteness. What happens when bodies renounce a Blackness they cannot escape to approach the asymptote of whiteness? How is the performance of whiteness worn (down)?
The Graft series explores how subjects modify and manipulate their bodies to straddle (ab)normality. The series communicates how a Black subject, determined from without and defined by all she is not, actively participates in her own transformation – a metamorphosis represented by the adoption or removal of a new layer of skin.