REPRESENTED BY CAA / INQUIRIES: VIA EMAIL
REPRESENTED BY CAA / INQUIRIES: VIA EMAIL
A series of Incomplete Gestures (2021-2023)
Movement Study > Short Film
By Kate Vozella
Voiced by: Alison Jaye
Presented at Wild Geese Gallery, NYC
November, 2023
For a year, I wandered the streets of New York City watching the shapes made by bodies in motion: limbs folding, twisting, reaching, sometimes seeming to resist gravity. Some gestures were ordinary—a man hailing a taxi, a woman stepping over a puddle. Others were strange, singular, enormous even by New York standards.
I began to think of a person as the sum of these movements. But the sum could never be complete. A gesture becomes another gesture; a body is always arriving somewhere, leaving somewhere, adjusting, reaching, retreating. If movement were an equation, it would remain unsolved: an infinite progression.
Most of this happens without thought. When I could, and when it felt appropriate, I photographed or filmed these gestures. Later, at home, I would imitate or respond to them in front of a camera. In repetition, the movements became elastic. They loosened from the strangers who had made them and began to lead somewhere else. A raised arm became a collapse. A turn became a reach. One gesture produced another.
Once a body begins moving, it is difficult to imagine it stopping. Gestures change, repeat, disappear. Eventually, of course, they end. One day each of us will make a final movement—small or dramatic, witnessed or unseen—and then no movement will follow.
Movement usually begins with thought, intention or need. By repeating the gestures of strangers, I became interested in the small narratives carried inside them. Children seemed to move with an almost total freedom. Adults carried more restraint: distraction, urgency, purpose. Bodies are changing with the world around them—necks folding downward toward screens, shoulders narrowing inward. In older bodies, even the smallest movement can reveal effort, time and gravity.
Watching closely produced an unexpected intimacy. The more particular each gesture became, the more collective it seemed. Different bodies, different lives, briefly joined by the simple fact of having to move through the world.
The project culminated in a four-hour-and-fifty-minute performance, part of which is captured in the film above. I performed inside the large window of a two-story building on the Lower East Side, interpreting the movements of strangers in real time. People passing below could look up and see their gestures returned to them: the city watching its own body move.