Helanius J. Wilkins
BRANDING and WEB DESIGN
Helanius J. Wilkins is an award-winning choreographer, performance artist, innovator, and educator based in Boulder, CO where he is Associate Chair and a Professor of Dance at the University of Colorado Boulder.
Wilkins's creative research and projects are rooted in the interconnections of American contemporary performance, cultural history, and identities of Black men. His projects examine the raced dancing body and the ways that ritual can access forms of knowledge. Intrigued by ideas about indeterminacy in creative process and performance, he approaches performance and pedagogy as means of re-framing perspectives, creative practices, and technical training. In his intermedia collaborations he works with artists from a wide range of disciplines, including film, video, and design.
THE PROCESS
How do you rebrand an artistic career? How do you use the raw materials of an artist's history and identity to create a brand that works in service of, but does not inform, the creative pursuits that fall under its name? How do you pay homage to what came before while leaving space for what has yet to be unearthed?
Wilkins and I engaged in multiple in-depth, thoughtful conversations about these questions and how his identity and history influence his creative research. We hoped to create a branding identity that can grow with him as an artist and can accommodate shifts in artistic direction without the branding losing relevancy.
Inspiration for this project was drawn from the evolving movement practice developed by Wilkins known as FRAMEWORK. Informed by architectural concepts, FRAMEWORK is experienced through the physical activity of framing and re-framing the space surrounding the body. This idea can be explored through the lenses of time, negative space, movement efforts, and macro versus micro. The final deliverables draw upon the principles of FRAMEWORK and questions the different ways the canvas can be re-framed via rotation, overlapping and proximity.
Wilkins and I collaborated with photographer Christopher Michael Carruth to capture a new set of images as part of the rebrand process. The imagery captured by Carruth utilized long exposure as a tool to capture the passage of time; another illustration of Wilkins's FRAMEWORK woven into the brand identity.
