Copyright of David-Jeremiah. Courtesy of CulturalDC.

There’s a point every summer in which the warm weather begins to feel a little too warm, and the once refreshing beat gradually sours. The days pass at a lackadaisical crawl and the intrusive arm of humid air reaches in through any window unlucky enough to be left open. The thought of leaving the air conditioning is enough to make anyone sweat, and yet—there is no patron more persistent than a family vacation with an itinerary for the outdoors. “No matter what day, no matter what the weather is, no matter what time of day, it’s just swarming with tourists,” artist David-Jeremiah remarks of his native Dallas. “So there’s this international tourist destination where a man got his wig pushed back in front of his wife.”

The multidisciplinary, conceptual artist was born and raised not too far from the John F. Kennedy
Memorial, the reference in question, and the site where the president was assassinated in the fall of 1963. There’s something about the energy in Dallas that is electric, shares David-Jeremiah, an intangible feeling that pulses through every streetlight. A concrete oasis born in the unforgiving Southern Plains, planted with the seeds of consumerism and watered by the silent majority. “The conversation that happened between Micah Xavier Johnson and those five cops on that fateful July 7th, during the Black Lives Matter movement [in 2016],” David-Jeremiah continues on his unequivocal urban surrounds. “We kill presidents, and we kill cops. That’s Dallas.”

Photos By Vivian Doering. Courtesy of CulturalDC.

The city has influenced a number of David-Jeremiah’s works, whether directly or indirectly. His mind is constantly parsing through the never-ending stream of information to discern his next subject matter. “It’s all about the concept—what it means, what it’s attempting to communicate,” he explains. The artist has nine composition books that act as a physical manifestation of the thought process that goes into synthesizing social movements into art. “I see it in my head. I do sketch every once in a while, but it’s mainly text. That’s how I flesh it out,” David-Jeremiah explains.

The artist’s latest immersive art installation is a testament to his ability to transmute frustration and anger into a cathartic practice. A play on the trend of ‘yoga gurus’ that cropped up in the 2010s, David-Jeremiah’s FOGA isn’t your LA cool girl superficial wellness plan where the only deep tissue you’re targeting is your lower abdomen. Taking place in a prison day room, FOGA, or Felon Yoga, presents itself on the surface as a perverse oxymoron. The opening land page of the performance greets you with fiery explosions and large scratchy text while the one and only FOGA-Founder *****-******** ( pronounced “bleep-bleep” in the TV censorship tone) greets the audience with an enthusiastic “What’s poppin’ my n*****s!” The FOGA: Real-N****

The project’s accompanying Edition Box Set comes with weighted weapon cutouts, 6 Blu-Rays, and handcuffs along with other miscellaneous materials to aid and abet in the final goal of the program: to kill a cop. And at first glance, to some viewers it evokes feelings of confusion. How can imagining oneself killing an individual bring peace and wellness? But as you walk around the 3,000 foot-space, you become enveloped in David-Jeremiah’s theater of performance. Through the structure of the exercise class, the meaning behind FOGA becomes clearer: releasing 500-years of built up frustration and anger shouldn’t have to be through the white-washed lens of wellness in the 21st century.

The shock factor of radical nonviolence in his work is not provocative or shocking to many of his peers or within the artist’s own life experiences. The shock factor itself comes out of the differences between the viewer’s own experiences and the show’s performance. The feelings and emotions David-Jeremiah invokes are visceral forces to be reckoned with, no matter your social positioning. If you didn’t notice, in David-Jeremiah’s theater, there is an empty vacuum where there should be rows of seats. Instead, you enter on stage right. Instead of a typical gallery viewing bench, there is a prison bench. “I try to flesh out the conversation so much to such a degree to where the only thing that’s left over is what you bring to it. What you say or what you don’t say,” the artist contemplates, “Everything has been marinating for so long that once you do say it, it is gonna magnify it. So that’s my main objective with all of my inverted performance installations.”

Actually, David-Jeremiah is nowhere to be seen in the theater. Instead, you may find him in the back working on his next concept. He may have started out as a performer, but the artist has comfortably settled into his role as the playwright. “Everybody plays the fucking game. When you train a horse or whatever, you train a dog, it’s based on rewards and stuff like that, for the most part, you’re playing the game with the dog to get what you want. But when I had the revelation that as a n**** in America, I’m doing a certain amount of acting just to not be a statistic. On top of that, I’m doing even more acting with my purest energy, which is creative energy. That’s how I started thinking about it. I was like, ‘Bro, when you act, you’re literally putting your flesh around somebody’s words. But who’s above you?’ And I say, ‘Well, the director.’ The director is directing the flesh around somebody else’s words, so they have more control. But who’s closest to the God, you know? And it’s the fucking playwright. Because that’s who wrote the words for this whole world to exist. So, I’m the playwright.”

Written by Julia Smith