New Orleans-born, New York-based artist Rashaad Newsome‘s practice is varied, ranging from video, sound and installation to a shade-inspired performance series that gets more polished every year. This is the latest incarnation of his vogue series. FIVE (The Drawing Center), as profiled by ARTnews, features several dancers whose dyed hair, nails, eyebrows and color contact lenses represent the five components of competitive vogue performance — “blue is hands performance, red is catwalk, pink is floor performance, yellow is spin dips, and green is duck walking.”
Using an adapted Xbox Kinect depth censor, Newsome then live-recorded the dancers’ isolated movements, combining them into digital collage and a 3D rendering tracking the choreography along their blue, red, pink, yellow and green paths. The path rendering will serve as a skeletal structure for Newsome’s upcoming sculpture. This adaptation “turn[s] what the dancers are doing into physical objects,” Newsome explained.
For more on the art form of vogueing and New York’s current ball culture scene, check out ANIMAL’s mini-documentary “Vogue Knights” by Citizen. P.S. We’d love to hook up Newsome and the crew with the makers of the RGBDToolkit!
