El/yse Ambrose’s Artist Statement: I employ images (still, moving, digital, and archival) and sound (spoken and found) to practice witnessing and recording the aliveness and possibility of blackness, transness, and queerness while retaining subjects’ opacities, illegibilities, and irresolution. Through my visual and aural projects, I foreground the profundity of quotidian world(un)making, of subtlety and slowness in movement, as well as themes of intimacy and connection, healing and the sacred.
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My chosen media yields sensoria toward ethical world(un)making. The art is an invitation to experience, to aesthetic intimacy, and to blacktransmovements beyond.
Recent Collaborations
See select images and oral histories from Ambrose’s series, “Spirit in the Dark Body: Black Queer Expressions of the Im/material,” in their book A Blackqueer Sexual Ethics: Embodiment, Possibility, and Living Archive.
Contributor, Cane: A New Critical Edition Oracular Card Deck, a project by Diane Exavier, Carlos Sirah and Anne de Marcke (Olympia, WA: The 3rd Thing Press, 2023).
Release
Written and Performed by Elyse Ambrose
Filmed by Elyse Ambrose
This video features audio excerpts from a "Movement Monday" episode by Kyndra Frazier with permission. This media was a part of the “Animisms, Those Queer Transmissions” performance and film series, curated by Jaguar Mary X through Local Project (NYC).
stills from a practice in freedom-making, archive #28,
An archival excerpt from mama [rose.]— an experimental choreopoem as meditation, written and performed by Lamda Literary finalist, storäe michele
Filmed by Elyse Ambrose