Category: artworks

In the Sky I am Walking

A maya+rouvelle collaboration with the NY vocal ensemble Ekmeles.

Live-streaming Saturday, July 18 at 8pm EST.

We’ll be streaming in 1080p — we suggest adjusting your resolution accordingly.

Featuring music of
Raven Chacon, Asdzaa Nádleehé & Yoolgai Asdzaa (2016)
Karlheinz Stockhausen, In the Sky I Am Walking (1972)

Artists maya + rouvelle have created visual art/video/titling/staging elements for this special event, streamed live from the singers’ home in Brooklyn, NY.

Performers
Charlotte Mundy, Soprano
Elisa Sutherland, Mezzo Soprano
Steven Beck, Piano

Ekmeles’ core female vocalists present a special live-stream edition of Karlheinz Stockhausen’s In The Sky I am Walking (1972), and a November 15th 2019 recording of a live performance of Raven Chacon’s Asdzaa Nádleehé & Yoolgai Asdzaa Changing Woman / White Shell Woman.

Both works speak to an “ancient future” via their integration of contemporary and traditional practice.

In The Sky I am Walking was composed during a period when Stockhausen was experimenting with musical forms and experiences based on punctuated gestural, timbral, and harmonic loops. The Diné Bahane’ (Navajo: Story of the People), from which Chacon drew inspiration for his work, involves a similar contemplation of loops in time punctuated by gestures and moments of unity and individuation.

Asdzaa Nádleehé & Yoolgai Asdzaa and In The Sky I am Walking envision an active common ground composed of these two worlds, and energized by the rhythm, loop and nuance of their eternal transformation of each other.

maya+rouvelle’s visual art is intended to evoke the underlying resonance from which these different worlds emerge and unfold. The visual language encoded in the live stream itself: the set, camera angles, choreography, etc., acknowledges our shared moments of social distance and aspirations of transcendence.

Stockhausen’s theatrical work is based on English translations of poetry from the Chippewa, Pawnee, Nootka, Teton Sioux, Ayacucho, and Aztec nations.

Chacon’s work is titled for two powerful goddesses in the Navajo tradition, Changing Woman and White Shell woman. The text draws on important elements of the Diné Bahane’ .

This performance is free to all, and will be online for one week following the live stream. We would like to call your attention to the Navajo Nation COVID19 Relief Fund. Details on donations both monetary and non-monetary can be found at: nndoh.org/donate.html

Our studio (maya+rouvelle) created the visual art for for the March 1, 2020 performance of Monteverdi’s Vespers at Shriver Hall in Baltimore. The performers included the Baltimore Choral Arts Society, Washington Cornett and Sackbutt Ensemble, Baltimore Baroque Band, and Peabody Renaissance Ensemble, all conducted by Blake Clark.

Our video project included entirely original footage shot in Italy, Spain, and the US. Some of the imagery is based on, and includes excerpts from works by Fra Angelico, Andrei Rublev, Jan Van Eyck, Aert van der Neer, Mosaics from the Basilica di San Marco, Venice, and The Osservanza Master.

Below are links to the movements with this recording of the Vespers by John Eliot Gardner. We developed the project using this recording.

In part II of this documentation we will post imagery/clips from the live performance in Baltimore.

The performers on the recording are:

Ensemble: English Baroque Soloists
Choirs: Monteverdi Choir / London Oratory Junior Choir
Conductor: John Eliot Gardiner
Soloists: Michael Chance (Countertenor), Bryn Terfel (Bass), Alastair Miles (Bass), Ann Monoyios (Soprano), Sandro Naglia (Tenor), Nigel Robson (Tenor), Mark Tucker (Tenor)
Year of recording: 1989 (Basilica di San Marco, Venice)

A great inspiration to us, in addition to the music, was the painting of Fra Angelico. As we did some research into Fra Angelico’s work we found some incisive theoretical writing by Georges Didi-Huberman. Didi-Huberman observed what he terms dissemblance and figuration in Fra Angelico’s work. Didi-Huberman’s writing can be found in Fra Angelico: Dissemblance and Figuration. These ideas resonated strongly with our concept for the project.

An example of dissemblance is below, an excerpt from Fra Angelico’s Noli me tangere, where the marks/colors for the stigmata are identical to the marks/stigmata of the flowers near Christ’s feet. The stigmata are displaced and the same marks become flowers in the pictorial space. These marks reference things we know (flowers and wounds) and know as different, yet here they are visually identical, and neither literally portrays what we know them to be.

What is evoked, experientially, is a meditation on materiality, essence, and meaning. The quantity of marks — five flowers, echo the five wounds of Christ. Figurability has to do with experiences evoked from visual media that are unique to visual media, an a-rational realm of experience and thought exemplified in Fra Angelico’s work.

To us the spirituality of the Vespers, and part of its mystery, is evoked by activities of transfiguration (we understand this is an Orthodox/Alchemical concept — things Monteverdi would have been familiar with). In Vespers the sacred and secular are interlaced, as are the traditional and new — a radical schema in its day. The work begins with a quotation from Monteverdi’s opera Orfeo, yet, unlike the serial working out of the narrative found in his great opera, Vespers seems to present a parallel/simultaneous meditation on the essence of spirit and the sublime, where objects are formations of spirit — God is not “in” things, things are “of” God. The practice of the artist/alchemist/priest (Monteverdi, later in life, was definitely two, and may have been all three) is to evoke this revelation, not through argument, but via experience. In Noli me tangere the dissemblance evokes precisely this.

Lastly, our treatment is inspired visually by the tradition of Vespers as a candlelight/twilight service.

Movements II-IV played without pauses, including visual crossfades between movements.

 

II. Dixit Dominus – psalm 109 {Motetto ad una voce}

 

III. Nigra Sum (Canticle) {Octo vocibus}

 

IV. Laudate Pueri – psalm 112 {A due voci}

 

V. Pulchra Es (Canticle) {Motetto à 6}

 

VI. Laetatus Sum – psalm 121 {A due voci}

 

VII. Duo Seraphim {A dieci voci}

 

VIII. Nisi Dominus – psalm 126 {Prima ad una voce sola poi nella fine à 6}

 

IX. Audi Coelum {Prima ad una voce sola poi nella fine à 6}

 

X. Lauda Jerusalem – psalm 147 {Motetto à 7 voci}

 

XI. Sonata à 8 {Sopra Sancta Maria ora pro nobis}

 

XII. Ave Maris Stella {Hymnus à 8}

 

XIII. Magnificat {Septem vocibus et sex instrumentis}

flickr set

Our installation for the Cooper-Hewitt’s The Senses: Design Beyond Vision exhibit curated by Ellen Lupton and Andrea Lipps.

The individual glass pieces were made at the Museum of Glass in Tacoma and during a residency at the Pilchuck Glass School.

In addition to kinetic and sonic qualities produced by electromagnetism, this new installation includes a haptic section where visitors can touch the glass and feel resonant frequencies pulsing through specific objects.

Inspired by the translucence of glass, our work embodies invisible forces indexed in the shapes, behaviors and sensual qualities of each object. Electromagnetism and code influence the movements of round neodymium magnets inside some of the pieces. The resulting sounds reveal unique acoustic properties.

from the exhibition label:

“Inside two display cases are glass volumes in the shape of cones, domes, and droopy tubes. Tiny metal spheres roll around inside the vessels, tapping lightly against the glass. These little spheres are powerful magnets. Installed underneath the tabletop are electromagnets. The tiny spheres change direction when the electromagnets switch their polarity from north/south to south/north. Created by Lili Maya and James Rouvelle, the piece sounds delicate and irregular, like falling rain.

Some glass shapes are exposed on the tabletop. Artists Lili Maya and James Rouvelle created this special touch component of their piece especially for this exhibition.”

Our work is also featured in the exhibition catalog.

the live performance.

video from inside the VR environment during the performance.

flickr set

River and State was commissioned by the ICOA Chamber Orchestra, Daniel Feng, Conductor, as part of their New World/New Music series. The piece is in honor of the 125th anniversary of Antonin Dvorak’s 9th Symphony, From the New World, and was premiered at the Bohemian National Hall in NYC. The accompanying composition is Dvorshock by Bruce Adolphe – also commissioned by the ICOA. The premiere of River and State featured a live performer, Laura King-Pazuchowski, on stage with the orchestra, interacting with the VR environment we developed.

Our concept for this virtual cinema performance is about the promise of a new world in both the late 19th and early 21st centuries, with its unlimited potentials, personal freedoms and inevitable progress, and how technology (the subway, opened in NYC in 1904, and the recent VR fascination, as examples) has always played a role in complicating these fantasies.

Our performer, Laura King-Pazuchowski traversed the membrane of our shared environment of lived experience and the fantasy of virtual, illimitable, dream-space.

The VR environment features renderings of Lower Manhattan, Inwood Hill Park, Ellis Island, and an amalgam of different Subway stations. The piece is also inspired by observing flash floods on certain Manhattan streets built above drained streams. whose resulting chaos suggest the transposed, consistent presence of foundational forces occluded by the trappings of contemporary material culture.

The Tulips are a reference to the Tulip tree of Inwood Hill Park where the initial meeting, and subsequent purchase of Manhattan from the Native population occurred. The tree died in the 1933. The sculpture of the Tulips encountered during the capsule scene is a rendering of a currently infamous Jeff Koons sculpture that has a connection to the Statue of Liberty.

The metronome seen at the beginning on the shore returns in the final scene as a monument sized rendering of Man Ray’s “Indestructible Object”. The character in front of the metronome in the final scene is a rendering of the actor.

The translucence of glass – the ability to see through a solid form, has always interested us. In our previous work with glass we explored sound as another less visible aspect of the medium – but a quality with enormous physical resonance and emotional power. The invisibility of sound waves, their coupling with the physical realities of the objects that create them, and the translucence of glass are, for us, situated at the border of understanding and imagination.

Curated by Benjamin Wright, our new work for Pushing Buttons @ UrbanGlass can be understood as a tableau — a portrait, but a portrait absent of a specific, human subject. Yet the evidence of a presence, the things that would be around a person, or a group of persons, are all there. An absence is perceived in an act of both observation and imagination. This is a kind of transparency of a foundational structure that to us is analogous to glass.

The relationship of Artifice and the natural world is at the center of Caesura. Yet the natural world, represented by replicas, appears authentically only in video on tiny screens. The electronics, glass and other manmade components are presented in various contradictory situations as if the persons who inhabit this world have lost a clear sense of a conflict between organic and inorganic, between reason, and fantasy.

Caesura is not a synthesis, it is an amalgam. The irregular rhythm of the metronome, placed within the tableau at the scale of a monument and covered in a large symmetrical glass bell with a funky handle, suggests that one’s reason is prone to produce mysteries and data in equal measure. Perhaps pitting these aspects against each other is obscuring a perception of the invisible, formative structures of which we are a part, and within which conflict is an illusion.

Full Flickr set/video here.