Deeply informed by breakthroughs in feminism, I have been painting all of my life. Six years ago, I returned to dance, after a 25- year hiatus, and simultaneously took the deep dive into the moving image, creating sumptuous yet austere one-woman video pieces that encourage viewers to think in new and astonishing ways about the body in motion. Performance, dance, photography, painting, sculpture, film, poetry and sound are among the different mediums I use to question and explore the female condition. Sexuality, absence, tender madness, abandonment, seduction, solitude, and maternity are themes I visit with ambivalence, humor, and rhythm – all in a perpetual motion. I grew up in Memphis, Tennessee, spending formative time with fellow artists William Eggleston, Lynn Sachs, Ira Sachs and others. I received my BFA at the Kansas City Art Institute. For the last 36 years, I lived and worked in Paris and moved back to the United States in July 2021.
‘In the videos, I film myself as a tableau. I center the camera on a tripod and move within the fixed frame as a flat plane. It is a documentation of captured moments. I am alone using my body as a tool. I move, dance, use precise hand gestures in the same way that I paint or sculpt. I roll my hips, take steps, stand up, crouch down close to the ground. I connect to what I am at the moment and visit memories of holding a child on my hip, feeding it, chasing demons, evoking well – being, caressing, soothing, being present with another, or standing in the current of a river allowing phenomena to rush past me. I am the mother, I am the lover, I am the woman, I am the artist. I am each, I am none, I am‘
Laetitia Hohenberg