Wakes and Waking Sings, 2016

There are 4 stages in the work. The first is an object-filled room with a sound installation. The sound is played from a record; it is the breaths of Maria Callas while singing Gluck’s J’ai Perdu Mon Eurydice, with remnant fragments of the song. The objects in the room are marble slabs on black walnut plinths, with unfired bone china objects on them. Hanging from a network of ropes and linen are sacks made of lambskin, dripping liquid that smells like earth.

In the second space is a 2-channel sound installation, a marble table with bone china goblets for the audience to drink from, and tall narrow vitrines filled with objects. The sound installation, Having Loosed Having Been Loosed, is an abstracted representation of two experiences, that of Orpheus and that of Eurydice, of leaving the land of the dead. It is composed for the songs of extinct birds, conjugations and examples of the verb “perdu” in French, and Greek conjugations of the verbs to loose and to have been loosed.

The third space is a large hall, empty except for 2 female dancers.They are each waltzing alone, careening through the expansive space in precise ritualized movements and increasing frenzy. Sometimes they collapse and are forced to begin again, slowly. The room is twilit. There is a group of old women dressed in mourning in the corner, talking about the weathers of their childhoods and things and people they have lost.

In the fourth space is the Storyteller, a red fox in a marble and glass vitrine with an air filtration system. The fox is being consumed (slowly) by flesh-eating beetles, who will eventually turn it bone. The air filtration system quietly hums. The work is its own ritual/ized journey, within which the boundaries of life and death are confused, complicated, and disrupted. The viewer shifts between observer, mourner, witness, and initiate, destabilized like one at a wake at which the body wakes.

Work supported by Akademie Schloss Solitude