Tether
with Jaleesa Johnston
2019
Tryon Creek, Portland, OR — lands of the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde, Stl’pulmsh (Cowlitz), Kalapuya, Clackamas, Confederated Tribes of Siletz Indians, Cayuse, Umatilla, and Walla Walla
photography / witnessing
Tags: performance, site responsive, photography, witness
From collaborating artist Jaleesa Johnston:
Tether is an iterative, ongoing work by artist Jaleesa Johnston that began in 2017, and takes place across live performance, video and writing to explore different facets of the bound body through movement and gesture. Fastened to a tree with a braid, Johnston works through improvisational movement that articulates the relationship between the body and earth. Tether engages the confines of the body and material to ask what it means to transcend and how do we "get free" (in the words of Nat Turner Project).
This photographic series documents and extends Johnson’s site-responsive piece, created in dialogue with the forested environment of Tryon Creek. Through Johnston’s presence and gesture, the work resonates with themes she previously explored in her piece Physical Law—invoking histories carried in the Black female body, and the layered symbolism of trees and fruit as both sites of racial violence and sources of knowledge, sustenance, and resilience.
The camera witnesses these convergences: body with land, history with present moment, gesture with gravity. In framing Johnston’s improvisation, the series underscores how the act of moving with and against (but always in relation to) natural forces can unearth both grief and groundedness, vulnerability and resistance.
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Performer: Jaleesa Johnston
Photographer/witness: Sophia Wright Emigh
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