Visual Music Performance | Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art| Kansas City, MO | 13 February 2025
Night/Shift is a semi-regular community engagement event produced by the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in which they curate an evening of art happenings and exhibitions featuring local artists. Adina Duke, then the Manager of Public Programs and Creative Practice, commissioned a live performance from my collaborator Calvin Arsenia and myself for this event in 2025. We were asked to create a show in response to their new exhibition, Mapping the Heavens, which centered on art objects, texts, and scientific research around the evolution of astronomy in Islamic lands and Europe. I was given access to the digital archives of the work on exhibit and used several of the images as elements in the performance. The piece explores the more mystical side of our cultural understanding of the celestial sky, bringing in our own influences from astrology, nature, and experimentation. Pareidolia is a phenomenon of human perception in which meaning and objects are seen in randomness and textures, for example, clouds shaped like faces. We related this to how humans have seen different shapes in and told stories about the constellations of the night sky. Using the astrological calendar as a structure for our performance, we designed six improvisational movements cycling through the seasons. I designed the visual components of this performance as real-time systems to be played as a visual instrument in relation to the music performed by Calvin. I enlisted local artist designer Chris Dong to assist with creating a desk environment, where I could control the show, that reflected a messy, chaotic, astronomer’s work space.
Concert Visuals: Evan Tedlock
Music : Calvin Arsenia
Production Assistance : Chris Dong
Exhibitions
– Night/Shift | Curator: Adina Duke | The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art | multimedia projection mapping, visual music performance | 60-minutes
