Will Rawls: [siccer]

Opening in spring 2025 and featured in ICA LA’s main galleries, [siccer] is an interdisciplinary exhibition by Los Angeles-based artist and choreographer Will Rawls. Part immersive installation, part live performance, [siccer] is a singular project that uses dance, photography, animation, and sound to investigate the role of media in constructing, exploiting, and erasing the Black body.  

Using the techniques and technologies associated with photography, cinema, and the stage, Rawl’s [siccer] challenges divisions between the living, the captured, the rehearsed, and the performed.  Experimenting with stop-motion animation, the work features a compilation of still images that have been stitched together to produce moving images depicting a cast of Black dancers in various states of movement. These stop-motion videos are then projected onto chroma green frames suspended from the ceiling, reminiscent of the green screens commonly associated with film production. At once caught, distilled, fragmented, and unfinished, gestures glitch in and out of focus across Rawls’ cinematic scaffolding, which both literally and metaphorically speaks to the invisibility of Blackness in contemporary society. 

The project’s title is inspired by the Latin adverb “[sic],” used to indicate incorrect spelling within a quotation, and often employed when Black vernacular speech is cited within a standard English text. Through this titular reference, [siccer] illuminates the ways in which Black performance evades white and Western forms of “correction” and classification, suggesting instead a way of being that is both iterative and endlessly becoming, much like the project itself. Within the work, as language and gestures mutate, so too does meaning, in the process revealing meaning itself as yet another construction—as that which both becomes and comes undone. In an image-saturated world wherein our technologies and identities are inextricably intertwined, [siccer] invites audiences to consider the verbal and physical play that marks how Black performance actively eludes capture and speculates on the potential for collective strategies of narrating the world, uncorrected.

Central to the ICA LA presentation is a series of live performances that will take place at the Roy and Edna Disney CalArts Theater (REDCAT) on April 10 – 12, 2025, presented by REDCAT and ICA LA. The exhibition at ICA LA and accompanying live performances will mark the premiere of [siccer] in Rawls’ home city of Los Angeles, and his most significant presentation in Los Angeles to date. For more information, and to purchase tickets, visit the REDCAT website. [siccer] was originally commissioned by The Kitchen in New York in partnership with The Momentary (Bentonville, AR), Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (Portland, OR), On the Boards (Seattle, WA), and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (Chicago, IL).