Sydney Spann & Michelle Luong
Saturday, September 24th, at 3pm ET, sound artist and musician Sydney Spann continues their 2022 ISSUE residency with a live performance in collaboration with artist Michelle Luong at a meadow adjacent to the Ridgewood Reservoir in Highland Park, Queens.
This collaborative performance is a continuation of Spann’s curiosity about childcare, sound, and psychoanalysis. In this iteration, their interest begins with thinking of lullabies as a skilled musical form—considering them as songs of labor simultaneously performed to execute a task as well as (like much utilitarian folk music does) encode glimpses of the singer/caretaker’s life and psychology outside of their caretaking role. Lullabies often disguise subjects including love songs, laments, ghost stories, and songs about revolution. The music soothes the worker and the child.
Without being tasked with children to sing to, Spann and Luong will be creating versions of lullabies for each other. The lyrical and sonorous content is derived from each artist’s experience in years of childcare as well as taking structural cues from lullabies that each artist was exposed to in childhood. The goal is not to put each other to sleep, but to give stage to expressions of the exhaustion, pain, intricacies, and tension embedded within daily responsibilities of care work.
The Ridgewood Reservoir is located along the border of Brooklyn and Queens, in Highland Park. A former water source for the City of Brooklyn, the site is now a thriving natural wetland. The Reservoir is 50+ acres and sits atop the Harbor Hill Moraine, rising above the surrounding Jamaica Bay outwash plain. Recent renovations have included new stairs, fencing, paved paths surrounding the reservoir, and the addition of handicap accessible entrances. Access to the pathways is available at Vermont Place, Highland Boulevard and Cypress Avenue. The Reservoir is most accessible via public transportation by taking the "J" train to the Cleveland Street station, the B13 and Q56 buses, and is approximately a 30 minute walk from the Ridgewood Neighborhood. Public parking is also available throughout HIghland Park.
The performance will happen at a meadow accessible by entering via the entrance on Vermont Place and turn right onto the bike/walk path. Exact location is accessible here.
In the case of forecasted inclement weather, a rain plan will be announced to all RSVPers.
Sydney Spann, originally from Baltimore, MD, is a sound artist and musician based in New York. They work with synthesis, electronics, recursive compositional processes and voice to intervene within a personal archive of field recordings, culminating in long form compositions and improvised live performances. Their music engages the private experiences that shape public spaces, and the affective dynamics within childcare work. They have released albums with She Rocks! (NYC), and Reading Group (NYC), with a full-length release forthcoming on Recital. They have performed at the High Zero Festival of Experimental Free Improvised Music, Bar Laika by e-flux, Performance Space New York, Center for Performance Research, Cafe OTO (London), KM28 (Berlin), and in diy spaces and galleries throughout the US. Recent commissioned works include Attached/Detached (partial disappearance) for ISSUE Project Room’s With Womens Work Series, and original music for artist Nile Koetting’s installation Downtime Salon at Musik Installationen in Nuremberg. They are an MFA candidate in Music/Sound at Bard College.
Michelle Luong (they/she) is a Chinese-Vietnamese inter-disciplinary artist, musician, and care worker. Their work slips between realities, blurs aliveness and death, follows the trajectories of libidinal drives and is preoccupied with eating, entering, receiving, melding, baby crowning, energies erupting and latent, repetition, oceanic feeling, fecundity and wetness. They use their work in performance, painting, sound, improvisation, and poetry to explore home, memory, fragmentation, liminality, loss, and identity linked to the Chinese-Vietnamese diasporic experience.They have performed with and worked in collaboration with many community organizations including Bé Bếp Baby Kitchen, Happy Family Night Market, Baltimore Museum of Art Lexington Market, GRLPWR, Baltimore Asians in Resistance Solidarity (BARS), and DrumBOOTY. They hope their work can caress you with a ghostly hand.
