This performance is a series of more than 250 photographs featuring a solitary male figure in a black suit rendered in soft focus against a white background on a gray floor. The figure in the performance is the photographer, and the sequence of images is reminiscent of Eadweard Muybridge’s photographic motion studies, without picturing the need for continuity implicit in his work.

The images were produced in a studio in Berlin during the US presidential primaries and election in 2015–2016, reflecting on news cycles populated with men in dark suits and the power contained in the formality of the attire. Taking cues from improvisation, from black and white newsprint and magazine photos from history, and incorporating influences from such artists as Kara Walker, William Kentridge, and Robert Longo, among others. The performance reflects on the physical language of the human form as an emblem or ideogram—starkly black against white.

The presentation of the images in this performance is in its multiplicities; large, grid-like arrangements with the ever-changing possible arrangements of the anonymous dark figure suggesting a linguistic form, open to interpretation. Separately, the images are also combined in a crude kind of stop-motion moving image putting the static figure in artificial motion towards no conclusive end. Within and between the individual gestures of this dark-suited figure emerge themes of aggression and suppression, of pop culture, of institutional torture and murder, of campaign performers and dictatorial gestures drawn from history, art, news, and improvisation.