I worked with my friend XiaoChuan Xie to write and apply for the Queens Council on the Arts inaugural, $10,000 artist commissioning grant which we received under Chuan's name. We are premiering the project, entitled SHED, at the Queens Botanical Garden July 20th...
The performance takes place under the awning outside of the botanical garden's main building.
Three dancers move inside of tetrahedron sculptures that I am making with Kyle Dietrich. The tetrahedrons are constructed out of plaster-coated canvases. The outer layers are black and the inner layers are all UV-sensitive florescent colors. As the dancers move inside they crack the outer layer and black lights in the performance area cause them to increasingly grow. This method of dancers "finishing" or putting the works to their final form is something that excites us and will be the driving force behind our future collaborations. Check out these images, one of the practice sculpture in normal light and then the same sculpture after one of the dancers (Lauren Shoemaker) has moved inside of it for 30 minutes, in UV light:
Sculpture under normal light, uncracked.
Plaster under UV-light, cracked and glowing. The outer layers SHED, revealing a glowing interior and throwing multi-colored debris onto the floor.
Each canvas is hand constructed, stretched and plastered. It is a very labor intensive process as we are building 1 practice sculpture and then 6 finished pieces, 3 for tech rehearsal and 3 for the performance. Here are some images of the studio. We are very excited about this project and staging future iterations with the concepts we've developed in the process.
