Rashaad Newsome Experience

Rashaad Newsome Experience:

Last week during Rashaad Newsome’s presentation, he displayed a wide range of his work.  The multimedia talent that was displayed was very impressive and engaging.  His different work includes video, music video, sculpture, sound, performance art, collage, and photography.  Growing up in the Lower ninth ward, Newsome went to a Tulane to study Art History.  He also studied Film at Film Video Arts NYC as well as music production and programming at Harvestworks NYC. 

The first video he presented was The Conductor that glitches the movements of hands in major hip hop/rap videos together.  I really enjoyed this video and the way that the camera angle would switch with every beat.  The synchronicity of video to sound was powerful.  The hand movements went along with the movement of the camera as well.  He talked about how this led to an instillation where he had projected moving hands on three screens with an accompanying performance.  The performance includes prewritten and freestyle rapping.

Newsome states that hip-hip is now a pop culture, which inspires his collage, work.  The body of work references heraldry as well as the recreation of medieval ornaments.  Reworking intricate, antique frames with his urban hip-hop style.  With imagery consisting of cars, planes, helicopters, boats, sexualized women, and an array of jewelry.  Newsome also displayed some gilding work creating dialogue to speak to old renaissance art history.  He would take his frames to luxury body shops for them to painted with pearlescent paints.  The imagery was asthetically appealing to my eye.

 Newsomes King of Arms body of work includes rims of luxury vehicles in the customized antique frames.  Something that I found interesting was his dedication to research before/ during creating bodies of work.  I think this also plays into why UConn invited him to give a presentation because we have such a proud researching university.  He conducted interviews and did a lot of research on the language of the Bourke as well as the history of heraldry.             

The artwork displayed next really spoke to me because of my interest in the subject matter.  Voguing.  Voguing is a performing identity dance that stemmed from Harlem New York.  It currently referenced under the name of Vogue Fem.  Newsome explained there are five basic guidelines to this dance, use of hands, the catwalk, the spin dips, flirt performance, and duck walking.  Newsome has used technology to create art further out of this hyper stylized dance genre.  Using a computer that Newsome helped develop, he traces the movements of dance in order to generate bright colored imagery.  For each dancer he uses a different color and he is currently working to create three-dimensional work with the results.  He also displayed a live drawing with a performance of Eastern instruments in Asia.  The saxophone was the only exception to the eastern musical instruments.  This is what being a multimedia artist is all about.  The ability to take one project and display it through so many mediums is powerful and creative.  This gives a diverse range of sensations while staying focused on one topic. 

I am really glad that I went to this talk with Rashaad Newsome because his work speaks to the urban artist in me in a way that I have not explored yet.  While displaying his work, he was very calm and collective especially for how loud his art is.  Loud in the sense that there is a strong presence and passion of energy in what he does.  I believe every artist has the ability to be multimedia and in this day and age it has only become easier to do so.  By being a multimedia artist, you allow different viewers to relate to the work you are creating, as well as giving different lenses to one individual viewer.