Can feeling be a way of knowing?

Coming together in an art gallery, six improvisors from distinct practices reach into the sensory present. Together they unfold fields of speech, live music, and dance. They spill across clean floors and white walls; light swirls through inky shadows. Their fabulations pry open channels between the bewildering envelope of the world and wild inner landscapes. Is the gallery a climate-controlled institution estranging us from nature and body, or a temple for sensing, feeling, and paying attention? Beneath concrete foundations, the bedrock shifts.

Weaving improvisation, the physicality of emotion, and felt-relationships to land, The Conditions unfurls from Lucy M. May’s uneasy search for a relationship with her homeland in Wolastokuk and the trouble of her settler origins. An interdisciplinary exhibition made in collaboration with Fran Chudnoff, Jon Cleveland, Ja James Britton Johnson, and Maisie O’Brien accompanies this long-form performance featuring live music by Patrick Conan and Amy Macdonald, and costuming by Pax. In the intimacy of a contained space, the public is invited to listen, gaze, wander, and sink in.

Click here to view the lineup of programs accompanying The Conditions.