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Thursday, March 10, 2022
Monday, March 9, 2020
Phantom Frequencies
Millville, NJ
June 2, 2019
in collaboration with Laura Baird
Phantom Frequencies was a site-specific installation and performance featuring glass instruments made with the WheatonArts glass artists. The project riffed off Wheaton's origins in the 1970s as a fake Victorian village. Sited in the museum's lobby, a simulated Victorian parlor, the piece channeled the spirit of parlor music played by amateurs in their living rooms during the 19th century. Composer/multi-instrumentalist Laura Baird and I designed the instruments inspired by historic glass objects in Wheaton's collection and composed an original score that mined the history of glassmaking in South Jersey and TC Wheaton's rise from seasick sailor to pharmacist to glass factory owner. The piece explored the myriad ways glass can speak in a dialogue between the ghosts of Wheaton's past and the glass of some imagined future.
Part of the group show Emanation 2019, curated by Julie Courtney.
Performance photos by Ryan Collerd
Installation photos by Neighboring States.
Video by Greenhouse Media.
Monday, July 30, 2018
Music for Modernist Shapes: Reimagining Spectodrama
Asheville, NC
November 18, 2017
with original score by Laura Baird
Music for Modernist Shapes was a site-specific
installation and performance that reimagined a 1936 theater piece Bauhaus alum Xanti Schawinsky made at Black Mountain College. The historic
performance, Spectodrama, included folded paper costumes, light projections and live music.
Composer/multi-instrumentalist Laura Baird wrote an original score drawing
on archival scores from Schawinsky’s performance collaborations with Black
Mountain College music teacher John Evarts, 1930s avant garde music and
Appalachian folk songs from the Black Mountain region. Laura and I activated my objects and costumes, conjuring the memory of
this little-known piece from the experimental college’s rich performance
history.
Commissioned by Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center as part of ACTIVE ARCHIVE: Martha McDonald, an exhibition I curated from the museum's permanent collection and an installation and performance made in response to the collection.
Photos and video by Michael Oppenheim.
Sunday, November 20, 2016
Songs of Memory and Forgetting
Philadelphia, PA
June 25, 2016
Music in collaboration with Billy Dufala
Songs of Memory and Forgetting was a site-specific performance at Revolution Recovery, a construction-waste recycling facility in Northeast Philadelphia. As artist in residence, I spent six months sifting through the mountains of rubble to collect personal items that arrived from house clean outs, often after an elderly person died or moved into a care home. The performance took audiences on an intimate song tour of the site, navigating the sorting piles to explore the fragile nature of memory. I collaborated with RAIR co-founder Billy Dufala on the music, which we performed on instruments found in the dump. Inspired by the collecting and sorting done on a massive scale by excavators and front-end loaders, I activated objects made from thousands of photos and garments rescued from the dump.
The project was supported by The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage.
Photos by Ryan Collerd
Video by Greenhouse Media
Friday, January 8, 2016
Hospital Hymn: Elegy for Lost Soldiers
Washington, DC
October 17, 2015
with Craig Woodward on fiddle and concertina
Hospital Hymn was a site-specific installation and performance that conjured the National Portrait Gallery’s history as a temporary hospital for soldiers during the American Civil War, where Walt Whitman worked as a nurse. Inspired by Whitman’s notebooks from the period, the piece memorialized the war’s quarter million unknown dead. Whitman suggests that their bodies became the compost of the nation—their spirits imbued in every stalk of wheat, blade of grass and flower that sprung from the dark fields of battle. I enacted a ritual releasing thousands of handmade felt flowers, referencing Whitman's compost imagery and drawing on the language of Victorian mourning handcrafts to suggest the enormity of loss. Accompanied by Craig Woodward on fiddle and concertina, I sang 19th-century hymns that Whitman recalled hearing nurses sing to dying soldiers.
Hospital Hymn: Elegy for Lost Soldiers was a companion piece to the exhibition Dark Fields of the Republic: Alexander Gardner Photographs, 1859-1872. It was commissioned by the National Portrait Gallery as part of its Identify: Performance Art as Portraiture series.
Thank you to Byer of Maine for in-kind support.
The names I embroidered on the sheets were taken from Whitman's notebooks. Most of these soldiers died in his care.
Photos by Ryan Collerd
Video by Greenhouse Media
Friday, March 27, 2015
The Lost Garden
Philadelphia, PA
September 26 - October 18, 2014
The Lost Garden was a site-specific installation and performance exploring impermanence and the fragile nature of memory. In the 18th century, The Woodlands was William Hamilton's spectacular botanic garden and greenhouse but it nearly disappeared in the rapid urbanization of the early 19th century. The garden was saved from extinction by transforming it into a Victorian cemetery, or "memory garden." Drawing on the language of Victorian handcrafts like wax flowers under domes and jewelry made from human hair, my installation of knitted flowers memorialized the lost plants from Hamilton's garden. The performance took audiences on an intimate song tour of the cemetery and into my installation in Hamilton's 18th-century mansion to conjure the dream of the lost garden.
The knitted specimens are based on plants Hamilton collected and wrote about in letters and journals. I researched patterns for botanically-accurate knitted flowers in Victorian ladies magazines and taught myself to make them. Then I developed my own.
Performance photos by Ryan Collerd
Installation photos by Joseph Hu
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