Films
Genesis 38:14 sees me enact a nonconsensual collaboration with James Turrell’s Sky Pesher by performing a pole routine inside of it. The meta commentary of nonconsent mirrors the allegory of the first account of a sex worker in the Bible, Tamar in Genesis 38: 14-15. Tamar, recently widowed and forced to live outside of the city walls as a single woman, sells sex to her ex father-in-law by way of stealing his sperm so that he would be compelled to marry/claim her and her child. Through movement associated with both erotic and modern dance, I trace the narrative trajectory of Tamar as both an exiled and revered figure of erotic potential inside and outside of Turrell’s Sky Pesher.
The Sky Pesher like most of Turrell’s sky spaces (architectural sites where the ceiling is cut out to blur the boundary between inside/outside and nature/constructed), are not wholly available to the public despite being sites that are meant to provide audiences a space where they can contemplate a spiritual reflection on nature. Coincidentally, the Sky Pesher, like most of Turrell’s work associated with museums thus not unique to this site, exists in the downtown city center in Minneapolis. Of which, in the United States, most city boundaries were constructed around the presence of sex workers (largely of color) either as inside or outside the city center. Genesis 38: 14-15, then, both restores that erotic labor to the site of Sky Pesher while also emphasizing the repressed erotic potential that exists within the space of worship that mingles with and against Turrell’s Quaker influence in the work.