Visual, sound, and performance artists Katherine Simóne Reynolds and A.J. McClenon experiment with translating their 2022 video collaboration from its previous online format into a three-dimensional, multi-channel installation with live performance interventions.

The artists riff on 1980s archival footage of influential choreographer and video artist Blondell Cummings (1944–2015) performing at The Kitchen NYC, which also commissioned the original version of this project. Revisiting their own video work Reynolds and McClenon share Cummings’s preoccupation with domestic spaces and everyday, physical practices of sustenance and relation that occur inside them.

Cummings used a stop-motion–like choreographic practice she called “moving pictures” that manipulated how her quotidian, expressive gestures were perceived in time and space, like traces of memory in quick succession. Such choreographic processes turned Cummings into both photographic subject and photographer—choosing and ordering her own image, at once being surveyed and surveying the world closely.

Reynolds and McClenon build on the intimacy Cummings created between herself and her observations of the world through these embodied love letters to Black domestic experience: a partial buffer from an anti-Black world. How do visibility, opacity, public, and private function when framed at once within the stage, screen, and home?

This sequence of somatic, gestural “how to’s” for living a domestic Black life first took the form of a video work shot in the public but intimate space of an open lot in Chicago. Translated into Studio 1—Goodman, the videos are housed in a shifting, home-like interior holding moving image, soundscape, and body, allowing the artists to physically intervene in how and when the original videos are witnessed. In this simultaneously protective and exposed enclosure, the artists move through cooking, holding hands and holding their breath, silently weeping, and loudly surviving.

Audiences can enter the installation at any time. On the first day of the festival, the artists perform intermittently; then, the traces of their presence remain in the space on the second day.

Ephemeral Organ is a series of residencies, performances, and talks by artists whose work explores choreography and bodily motion as technologies for transmitting memory, history, and Black lived experience. Each artist simultaneously navigates the ever-shifting nature of live performance and the urge to retain, return to, and generate traces of the past.

The word ephemeral suggests short-lived objects, activity that leaves residual evidence, and brief but intense durations. Archival materials not designed to be preserved but which are still potently present are often called ephemera. The word organ hints at the body and its parts, a series of interior vessels and chambers which intimately order—or organize—our modes of living. In dance and performance, bodies are often understood as having inherent archiving functions; archives are spaces of public record, systems which give purpose to what we want to keep. Our bodies hold experience, gain knowledge, recall behaviors, track gestures, and mediate infinite possible actions each time they move.

Interpreting archival materials, mining family memories, recording movement through technology—each Ephemeral Organ project holds past and present side by side, inseparably. Each of the artists has developed distinct choreographic devices through which performers can compose history through their bodies and which allows them to generate, keep, and even at times lovingly lose, a bodily record of their actions.

The series began with residencies and talks in fall 2024 with artists SHAWNÉ MICHAELAIN HOLLOWAY, Steffani Jemison, collaborative duo Katherine Simóne Reynolds and A.J. McClenon, and series curator Tara Aisha Willis.

In April 2025, using EMPAC’s spaces simultaneously like a series of chambers, the series culminates in two days of events including performances by Leslie Cuyjet, an installation and performances by Katherine Simóne Reynolds and A.J. McClenon, and artist talks by Steffani Jemison and Justine A. Chambers on their latest works which register archival and historical traces through gesture.

Jonathan González and julia elizabeth neal join the artists during the festival as guest writers and interlocutors, documenting the events for future archives in relation to their ongoing research on Black performance history and practice.

Food and refreshments will be available for purchase at Evelyn's Café throughout the festival.

Special event parking for Ephemeral Organ festival in the College Avenue parking garage will be open at 2PM both days.

Schedule

• THURSDAY, APRIL 17
• 3–8PM, Studio 1—Goodman
• INSTALLATION, PERFORMANCE
• Gestures Investigating the Good and Not So Good In Relationships – As Shown to Us by Blondell Cummings / Katherine Simone Reynolds and A.J. McClenon

  Reynolds and McClenon experiment with video installation and performance, meditating on domestic space and Blondell Cummings’s archive in a shifting, home-like interior. Live performance interventions intermittently on Thursday; then, the traces of their presence remain in the space Friday. Audiences may enter the installation at any time.

• 5:30PM, Theater
• TALK
• on In Succession / Steffani Jemison

  Jemison reflects on her fall 2024 residency for the latest iteration of a series of video and performance works exploring how bodies share weight and responsibility.

• 6:45PM, Evelyn's Café
• RECEPTION
• FRIDAY, APRIL 18
• 3–8PM, Studio 1—Goodman
• INSTALLATION
• Gestures Investigating the Good and Not So Good In Relationships – As Shown to Us by Blondell Cummings / Katherine Simone Reynolds and A.J. McClenon

  Reynolds and McClenon experiment with video installation and performance in a shifting, home-like interior, meditating on Blondell Cummings's preoccupation with domestic spaces. Live performance interventions intermittently on Thursday; then, the traces of their presence remain in the space Friday. Audiences may enter the installation at any time.

• 4PM, Theater
• DANCE/THEATER, PERFORMANCE
• With Marion / Leslie Cuyjet

  Cuyjet performs inside a cocoon of mediated memory, text, and gesture in her solo performance, With Marion.

• 5:30PM, Theater
• TALK
• on The Brutal Joy / Justine A. Chambers

  Chambers shares new writing on and recent documentation of her dance work, The Brutal Joy, a scored improvisation which unfurls Black vernacular dance alongside sartorial gesture.

• 6:45PM, Evelyn's Café
• RECEPTION
• 7PM, Evelyn's Café
• TOUR
• Building Tour w/ EMPAC Curators

  Meet in the café on level 5 for a building tour with an EMPAC curator, going behind the scenes to experience the center’s infrastructure as few do.

• 8PM, Theater
• DANCE/THEATER, PERFORMANCE
• With Marion / Leslie Cuyjet

  Cuyjet performs inside a cocoon of mediated memory, text, and gesture in her solo performance, With Marion.

All times are EDT

A ubiquitous fixture in DJ and electronic music for the better half of the last century, the record turntable has been utilized as an instrument in innumerable ways since its conception. Experimental musicians Victoria Shen and Mariam Rezaei explore and push the musical limits of turntablism in a thrilling and dizzying concert performance of new music for unorthodox instruments and objects where DIY sensibilities meet the audio technological capabilities of EMPAC's Studio 1. Extreme sonic textures and physical gesture substitute for traditional musical elements like melody and harmony, questioning commonly accepted modes of music and meaning making.

Victoria Shen is a sound artist, experimental music performer, and instrument-maker based in San Francisco, whose sound practice is concerned with the spatiality/physicality of sound and its relationship to the human body.

Mariam Rezaei is a multi-award winning composer, turntablist, and performer. She previously led experimental arts projects TOPH, TUSK FRINGE, and TUSK NORTH. Rezaei’s acclaimed music has been described as “high-velocity sonic surrealism” (The Guardian) that “harness[es] extreme technical prowess” (Boomkat).

In this program with video and performance artist Claudia Pagès Rabal, the artist shares various facets of her artistic research. Pagès’s past works have often engaged with palimpsests in which informal, vernacular languages and customs are at cross-purposes with official operations and the semantics of power.

Her recent work often swerves from intriguing cultural symbols to the raw material structures that underlie them and back to the unstable substance of language. A recent work Typo-Topo-Time Aljibe at SculptureCenter New York focused on a Moorish cistern successively rebuilt across many centuries, such that each architectural update coincided with new forms of displacement and cultural erasure. Through performance, video, and sculptural installation with a custom-made LED screen she fabricated, Pagès and her collaborators move through the graffiti in the cistern. The marks on its walls become a kind of found score that enlivens a complex flow of economic exchange and evolving cultural systems.

Pagès’s work often occupies what the artist refers to as the gerund: a space of language and movement that is detached from any particular subject.

Circulating, administering, grouping, and ungrouping—Pagès’s projects explore how discrete actions turn into endless tracings of motion and generate new forms of power. Pagès is particularly interested in the cultural life of logistics, often focusing on patterns of trade as they are reflected in material culture.

For this event, artist Jewyo Rhii is in conversation with curator Katherine C. M. Adams to discuss her artistic practice. Jewyo Rhii’s work engages with the long afterlife of artistic labor and builds public links to patterns of transit, movement, and storage we rarely see.

Her practice often bears the mark of itinerancy, reflecting on the experience of passing through places where one cannot stay and making meaning out of encounters with transient situations. Love Your Depot (2019– ) is a large sculptural installation using principles of storage to activate a workspace for younger artists; Night Studio (2009–2011) developed through turning Rhii’s studio space into an open house; and the exhibition Of a Hundred Carts and On (2023) activated art storage systems to give a shifting tableaux of works new meanings through their mobile, expandable installation. As Rhii interrupts objects on their way to being stored, shipped off, filed away, or compartmentalized, she affirms material culture in its moments of incompleteness. By engaging with states of personal and material precarity, and casting artwork in relation to the (im)possiblity of its preservation, Rhii allows us to see how ephemeral structures in our lives build their own stories—and hold ours together.

In this program, Rhii speaks in particular about how her work uses sculptural machines and architectural storage processes to create new possibilities for collective storytelling. The event will also touch on the collaborative facets of Rhii’s practice, which often directs itself to local communities and artist groups.

This event requires everyone to wear a mask in the venue.⁣ Masks will be available on entry.⁣

Multi-instrumentalist composer and electronic music historian Tara Rodgers produces a retrospective concert of selected works from the past 20 years, diffused in an immersive 4.1 sound system.

Rodgers’s research and music explore electronic sound as material and metaphor, with studio practice as a hands-on parallel to study of the long history of electronic music and sound. Her music is described as combining “rigor and reverence... bold in the precision and subtlety it takes to mix such signals with thrill and grace and restraint” (NPR Music), “carrying her listeners along through deeply felt, deeply connected sonic energy that embodies joy, transcendence, and positivity” (Routledge).

The concert juxtaposes her wide-ranging work across styles and methods, from generative computer music written in SuperCollider, to electroacoustic compositions featuring piano improvisation, to pulsing ambient and techno tracks.

As a historian and multidisciplinary scholar, Rodgers has also published essays in foundational volumes in contemporary studies of music, sound, technology, and culture. Her book Pink Noises: Women on Electronic Music and Sound (Duke University Press, 2010) brings together twenty-four interviews with women in electronic music and sound cultures who expand notions of who and what counts in matters of invention, production, and noise-making.

After the concert, Rodgers is joined by Rensselaer Arts graduate student and renowned DJ Rekha Malhotra, along with Director of the Center for Deep Listening at Rensselaer Stephanie Loveless for an onstage conversation and Q&A.

P. Staff shares their current work in Flesh/Flash: Scanning as Moving Image, a screening and open conversation at the culmination of their EMPAC residency. The artist’s recent research is exploring the act of scanning—as an image practice, as a mechanism of power and surveillance, and as a monitoring of bodily states.

Scanning’s capacity to produce moving images without standard film techniques is tied to its ability to orchestrate the body politic—probing the insides of things, organic as well as social. But what sort of data does this generate, really?

What is the spatial awareness that emerges from externalizing insides of various kinds, and how do imaging tools suggestive of clinical assessments generate something playful, or sinister? P. Staff explores how scanning opens us up, reflecting on the nature of carceral, disciplinary systems at work in them—but also on their potential for productive disorientation, as they pull us away from the body’s surface and open towards a queer, non-normative subjectivity.

This program features recent short films by the artist and provides a window into their current work. At EMPAC, Staff is deploying thermal cameras, Lidar, and audio techniques that register figures through non-imagistic footprints.

In conversation with project curator Katherine C. M. Adams, Staff considers how the scan forges a different sort of political aesthetics than the traditional passage of light through a filmic aperture. Their conversation is framed by a brief presentation of films and an attempt at a discursive performance of scanning the scan—exploring the stakes of taking a sensory X-ray of a locale’s subjects, and offering annotations of the techniques in Staff’s past and present work.

Featured Works

• La Nuit Américaine (2023)
• HEVN (2021)
• On Venus (2019)
• Weed Killer (2017)

Soaring trumpet lines transform into haunting, guttural subtones. Resonant vibraphone ferocity hovers over basslines that throb and sear. Torrential drumming pushes toward episodes of improvisatory sonic exploration that is languid at times, boisterous and frenetic at others.

In a concert performance, trumpet player and composer Peter Evans leads the quartet Being & Becoming. Featuring some of the most forward-thinking young musicians in Jazz and Contemporary music, each of the members of Being & Becoming are widely known for their individuality, virtuosity, and deep musical curiosity and rigor.

The quartet features Evans on trumpet, vibraphonist and synth player Joel Ross, bassist and bass synth player Nick Joz, and drummer Adriel Vincent-Brown. The dynamic and charged lighting design of Azumi O E heightens the alchemic creation and recreation of musical worlds onstage.

Evans' compositions for the band draw from a wide variety of sources, traditional and experimental, with a grounding in improvisational idioms, notated concert music, and an array of experimental approaches. The group has released two albums–their eponymous debut in 2020 and the symphonic work Ars Memoria in 2022, both on Evans’s label More is More.

The last two years have seen the group tour major festivals and venues in the USA and Europe, constantly developing new music. A new album recorded in 2024 at the legendary Rudy Van Gelder Studio in New Jersey will see its release in 2025. All four members are recognized as leading virtuosi on their respective instruments, and have thriving careers as soloists, bandleaders, producers, and composers.

This event is currently at capacity. Please arrive at the EMPAC box office on Level 7 30 minutes before the scheduled start time to be put on a waiting list for possible standby entry. Thank you. —The EMPAC Team

Korakrit Arunanondchai explores what the artist calls the ghost layer of images in this work-in-progress. Arunanondchai turns the Studio 1—Goodman venue into an atmospheric environment in which viewers are absorbed by cinematic gestures and proto-human forms. Footage moves in and out of visual clarity as images coalesce on clouds of fog and disperse into air. The program is in collaboration with Alex Gvojic, Aaron David Ross, and Michael Beharie.

The screening scenario also includes performance collaborators that emerge from and disappear into patches of darkness. Towards and away from legible figures, the audience experiences the dissolution of traditional film into pure atmosphere.

Arunanondchai’s artistic practice plumbs the depth of ritual, from everyday practices of cinema-going, to traditional spirituality in Southeast Asia, to the obsessive process of art-making itself. Past performances have taken elemental materials—heat, water—to dramatize the possession of spaces by their historical and sensorial ghosts.

For this work, possession is central—the overtaking of the artist by the work, the viewer by the image, the body by its environment. Arunanondchai’s project at EMPAC also draws on generative artificial intelligence to image chimeric, in-between forms that imagine speculative genealogies and formal affinities between different sorts of subjects, then re-projected as moving images. As he explores parallel, overlapping rhythms of East and West histories, Arnunanondchai’s work offers a vision of history as a sort of collective cinema that carries its own ghosts as it conjures new presents.