PERFORMANCE & ART INSTALLATION

SWEAT CRY
A WAKE OF VULTURES| VANCOUVER

JULY-AUGUST, 23

Collaborating with A Wake of Vultures, a project-based interdisciplinary performance company. WOV is a research, development, and producing vehicle for the works of its three members: Nancy Tam (music, sound design, theatre), Daniel O’Shea (film, theatre), and Conor Wylie (theatre). As a scenic designer for this project, I designed the walls and scrims for the performance space. Exploring reflections, projections, movement, subject, layer, and light, the design process unfolded during residency at Boombox, Vancouver.

I found deep inspiration in the work of both Nancy Tam and the A Wake of Vultures collective, their dedication to collaborating across disciplinary lines, particularly in theatre and visual design, strongly resonated with my artistic practice.

The project centers around a 50-foot-long container, creating an interior environment consisting of six rotating frames, each measuring approximately 8’x8’. These frames are positioned side by side and feature wooden-framed projection fabric as well as reflective panels. The immersive experience includes sound and light projections that play with one's perception of space and sensory experience.

With our movements in space, we observe how the spatial apertures operating at a slow motion through reflections, and light and dark dramatic moments in the room. Depending on our coordinates in space, there is always a feeling of contraction and expansion, like a space becoming wider or narrower in the peripheral vision. A sense of architectural scale, suddenly feeling shrunk in a grand space, or widening in a tight area, we shift our perception toward an awareness of our own body, facilitates the transition between perceptual emergence and perceptual awareness.