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Bull in a Chino Shop
2022
Urban Legends at Sonoma Ceramics (Sonoma, CA)
Sculpture by Reniel Del Rosario
Rapsodie espanole, M. 54: Boléro, M. 81 by Maurice Ravel
Urban Legends at Sonoma Ceramics (Sonoma, CA)
Sculpture by Reniel Del Rosario
Rapsodie espanole, M. 54: Boléro, M. 81 by Maurice Ravel
Bull in a Chino Shop was anchored around themes of entitlement over space, histories of racism present in physical environment, expectations around legibility, humor, and destruction. This dance was performed at Sonoma Ceramics during Reniel Del Rosario’s show Museum of Found Objects (MOFOs), which critiqued Western art institutions’ complicity in colonialism, orientalism, misattribution, destruction, and theft. We created a site-specific performance journeying through the historic Sonoma Community Center, culminating in Del Rosario’s exhibition, where we deposited and eventually destroyed ceramic casts of Orientalist figurines and vases.
Together, Emma Lanier, Reniel Del Rosario, and Cauveri Suresh create site-specific performances that consider relationships between bodies, between body and object, body and space, and object and space. Our work originates in our responses to the specific architecture of the space in which we are working, context about the space’s use (gallery, public commons, community center, etc.), as well as the history and politics of each space. Our collective works within frameworks that trouble the institutional boundaries of our respective mediums and attempts at ordering bodies and social relationships, and views freedom as an inherent quality of all bodies. As postmodern dancemakers, Lanier and Suresh generate and compose movement from methods like scoring, task, and deep attunement to the needs and expressions housed in the body. They perform dances to understand how bodies in motion impact other bodies, impact objects, and impact the space around them. As a ceramic artist who works with appropriation, art history, and installation, Del Rosario’s primary mode of critique and process is satirizing consumer establishments and trends, wherein he coaxes smaller, undisclosed details—whether unimportant or swept under the rug to keep up an image—into light. His works and larger installations are made to playfully discuss, dismantle, and recontextualize the seemingly-endless bound of a world tediously tied to capitalism.