caesura

maya-rouvelle-caesure

2018 — installation — a maya + rouvelle collaboration

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.

woven

maya.rouvelle-woven

2017 — performance — a maya + rouvelle collaboration.

Woven is a collaborative project for the Shanghai New Art Festival by maya + rouvelle and composer Weilu Ge.

The piece was performed in Shanghai 4 times at the Mercedes Benz arena and at the National Theater Academy.

Scored for Glass instruments, Bass, Percussion, and Pipa. The staged version included an actress and live video.

Program note:
We change as we adapt to our environments, and through that process we become amalgamations of each other. If we allow ourselves to see and be seen as these unusual reflections across space, time, and cultures we allow ourselves to learn through empathy, and cultivate wisdom. There is an essential human force that connects past and present, male and female, East and West, the known and the unfamiliar. Its goal is to weave us together into a stability of change.

Our project is about this energy. Spanning binaries, it is a force that builds social cohesion as it fosters individuality.

But we must do our part, to both weave and to allow ourselves to be woven, to permit the process to live within and around us. Without it things unravel, and we become lost in a pile of tangled threads.

Full Flickr set/video here.

of, from

lili-maya-rouvelle-mr-8

2017 – dimensions variable – digital print [original work / paper] > in-progress work for a maya + rouvelle collaboration.

place and borrow

lili-maya-placeandborrow

2016 — installation/performance — a maya + rouvelle collaboration

Realized in a re-purposed bank in Detroit, Place and Borrow is an interactive performance work for actor and media. The piece was developed for G. Louise Cooper, who gave the performance and installed the work in the multidisciplinary art space Grand on River as part of MicroMacro Art Biome (catalogue pdf). The video was shot by Remi Slade-Caffarel.

The basic premise of the piece is that somehow, through the process of installing the exhibit, the formerly abandoned bank has woken up to find itself an art space. It channels its dual nature through a head teller/performer and attempts both to continue its business as a bank and performance venue. This is America, 2016.

The media includes bismuth, lead, paper, string, bio-plastic, a wireless, head-mounted camera, projector, and a remote control vehicle.

video of performance / photo documentation

A detailed description of the piece, script, and other relevant materials can be found here.