Allora & Calzadilla – Intervals

12.12/2014 – 05.04/2015
Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia

This exhibition of new and recent projects by Puerto Rico–based artists Jennifer Allora and Guillermo direct payday lenders Calzadilla explores music’s capacity to evoke an ancestral time and interrogate http://paydayadvanceusca.com/ what makes us human. Through films, sound, live performances, and sculpture, the artists take on various notions of the interval—the time between events, the measure between two onlinepaydayloansusca.com points in project payday scam space, or the range between musical notes—in order to discover possible ways to reconsider the distance between our present and our past. Allora & Calzadilla: Intervals, the artists’ largest solo exhibition in the United States to date, unfolds over two payday loan lenders only sites: the Perelman Building at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and The Fabric Workshop and Museum.

Each Allora & Calzadilla work in this exhibition stems from a cultural artifact or a vibrant remainder from various moments in history, including the oldest musical instrument ever discovered, the remains of nineteenth-century elephants, a prehistoric figurine, or fragmented dinosaur bones. Live choral and orchestral performances reimagine concerts from another century, and an intimate vocal score produces a new friction betweenhuman presence and the prehistoric past. As archaeological exercises that unsettle linear time, these provocative works wrestle with the abyss that lies between the human experience and our evolving place within the larger universe.

Films
In the Perelman Building’s Julien Levy Gallery, a trilogy of films will be shown in sequence on three screens in an installation designed in collaboration with the artists. Each film emerged from Allora & Calzadilla’s rigorous studies of artifacts and a conceptual reconsideration of our possible relationships to them. Taken together, the films continue the artists’ exploration of the history and origins of human music and the traditional assumptions about what classifies life-forms as human or animal.
Sound Installation
A new sound-based work titled Interludes will play in the Perelman Building’s Skylit Atrium as well as at The Fabric Workshop and Museum, connecting the exhibition’s physical sites through the ethereal, ephemeral medium of breath. Interludes restores the breaths commonly muted from unmixed vocal recordings, moments that go unheard in final mastered tracks; the work reinserts these sounds into an audio sequence referencing the original composition. This sound project draws from audio recordings from the Sigma Sound Studios Collection of the Drexel University Audio Archives.

Performances
Two performances will be staged in the Skylit Atrium on selected dates throughout the exhibition: A new choral performance, In the Midst of Things, reconstructs Joseph Haydn’s oratorio The Creation (1796–98). Haydn’s composition is based on the Book of Genesis and John Milton’s epic poem Paradise Lost, which opens payday loans online in medias res, or in the middle of the story. For In the Midst of Things, the artists have embraced Milton’s nonlinear approach by subjecting Haydn’s work to a series of reversals, inversions, and interruptions. These interventions on the original musical payday loan score are mirrored by the singers’ physical movements throughout the space, poetically suggesting a reconsideration of time and the origins of humankind. For this performance, Allora & Calzadilla collaborated with The Crossing, a professional chamber choir dedicated to new music and conducted by Donald Nally.
A Concert for Elephants revisits a performance on May 29, 1798, in which an orchestra played to two elephants in the Jardin de plantes at the Muséum national d’Histoire ez internet payday system login naturelle in Paris. Restaging the first documented attempt to use human-generated music to communicate with animals, the performance takes place in both the open space of the Skylit Atrium and in the Levy Gallery, where it specifically intersects with the film Apotomē. For this performance, Allora & Calzadilla collaborated with Relâche, a chamber ensemble dedicated to contemporary music. Additionally, composer Christopher Rountree developed the arrangement and some original music.

Object
Technofossils trace the use of technology over time, from the first tools of early humans to the electronic media of the twenty-first century. Preserved in the archaeological archive, this artifact—a spark plug that became engulfed in fossilized stone as it sat at the bottom of the ocean—acts as an accelerated record of our current geological era. Formed over time yet reflective of our own moment, this technofossil collapses the intervals between past and present, technological progress and obsolescence, manmade materials and natural phenomena.

Also at The Fabric Workshop and Museum
The following works will be presented in addition to the sound piece Interludes:

Sculpture and Performance
A new work entitled Lifespan will occupy the first-floor gallery. A Hadean period rock sample, estimated to be more than four billion years old, hangs from the ceiling. During live performances, the rock is “played” by three vocalists whistling and breathing a composition by David Lang, their actions subtly moving the rock like a pendulum. The singers’ breaths, acting as a poetic form of wind erosion, bring humans into close contact with this rock sample. payday loans without checking account Lifespan connects the present moment with that of the earth’s origins, a time when there were no witnesses to the planet’s geological transformation.Vocalists from the chamber choir The Crossing will perform Lifespan at The Fabric Workshop and Museum seven days a week at 1:00, 2:00, and 3:00 p.m. On Saturdays when performances are scheduled at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, The Crossing will perform this work at The Fabric Workshop and Museum at 3:00 and 4:00 p.m.

Film
On the second floor, a new three-channel video installation, The Great Silence, focuses on the world’s largest radio telescope, located in Esperanza, Puerto Rico, which captures radio waves emitted from the edges of the universe. The site of the radio telescope is also home to http://paydayloansusca.com the last remaining wild population of critically endangered Puerto Rican Parrots, who make their habitat in the surrounding forest. Working with science fiction author Ted Chiang, who contributed the subtitles, the artists explore translation as a device to trace and ponder the irreducible gaps between actors: living and nonliving, human and animal, technological and cosmic.

Installation
Intervals, a new sculptural installation on the eighth floor, presents fragments of dinosaur bones arranged on top of transparent acrylic lecterns, offering a fractured reading of natural history that is potent, yet incomplete. The lecterns are assembled into sculptural monuments, raising each bone fragment to the corresponding height of its original location within the skeleton of the respective animal. These artifacts thus function as three-dimensional primary texts written into the geological record.

Locations
Julien Levy Gallery and the Skylit Atrium, first floor, Perelman Building, Philadelphia Museum of Art
The Fabric Workshop and Museum, first, second, and eighth floors, 1214 Arch Street, Philadelphia