Arnie Zane (1948-1988) is best known for his seventeen-year personal and artistic partnership with choreographer Bill T. Jones. Their creative interchange defined each other's artistic vision and led to one of the most celebrated collaborations and explorations of movement, gender, race, and politics in late twentieth-century dance. The Bill T. Jones / Arnie Zane Dance Company continues to bear Zane's name and to be inspired by his spirit.

Titled after Zane's extraordinary dance work, Continuous Replay is the first comprehensive presentation of Zane's photography. The strategy of the exhibition and its accompanying catalog derive from the method of Zane's most emblematic dancework. Continuous Replay, the dancework, is built up from the repetition and accumulation of 44 gestural positions closely related to the tight framing, symmetries, interrelationships, and crisp poses of Zane's photographs.

Zane took up the camera in earnest in 1971; the year he and Jones met. Over the short period of the next five years Zane's photography examined the body's physicality, sexual identity, and potential for harboring beauty and decay. From 1977 until his death from AIDS in 1988, Zane's primary focus moved from photography to dance though he continued to introduce photography and slide projections into his danceworks.

(On exhibition at UCR California Museum of Photography May 29 through August 9, 1999. Curated by UCR / CMP Director Jonathan Green. QTVR views: main room and entry.)

image gallery | the exhibition | ucr/cmp