Exploring spaces with Hanna Sutterlee, in MASS MoCA. A start to a series of Vermont based collaborations. Orchestrated while I was in residence at the Museum over the winter.
Portrait of a River is process. Presence allows witnessing transformations, leads to visceral respondings. What we're hearing here is belonging/becoming, a practice of an intuitive language, a language of a river.
A collaboration with Marie Claire Bryant, and Rob Lundberg.
In Transition Is The Most Honest is based within the realm of CauseLines. CauseLines is a multi-disciplinary interactive and investigative approach to geography by art collective Winter Count. This work engages a historic technology of music composition used by people of the Northern Plains. This is a practice of studying horizon-lines from which to create melody and tone repertoire. It is a process of resonating the landscape. Binding geography to culture. Singing the song-lines of belonging. We reference this pedagogy through a confluence of newer technological platforms. We’re creating scores from imagery of drone aerial footage that we have generated during times of resistance in places under threat of extractive industries. Places of Cause. This imagery follows natural and human influenced landscapes; river-lines, tree-lines, road-lines, pipe-lines. These are the CauseLines from which we score. The intention of these scores is to invite processes of belonging, clarity of place. Not creating meaning but finding the meaning that already exists. The scores are to be interpreted as song, as dance, as story. It is from the complexity of interpretation, subjectivity of improvisation, that we begin dialogue around how we establish our practice of place.
A commission by the Nordamerika Native Museum in Zurich, Switzerland. A Portrait of Leo Yerxa followed the artist in conversation in the last days of his abundant creative life and artistic career. The video was shown as part of a solo show at the museum in Zurich.
Improvisation by Tyler Rai at Sable Project in Northern Vermont.
Anthony Braxton explains the Sonic Genome music system in Turin, Italy.
The video for Starry Skies Opened Eyes is a collaboration between Diné filmmaker Dylan McLaughlin and Tlingit Unangax̂ artist Nicholas Galanin. Starry Skies Opened Eyes features vocals from multidisciplinary Métis artist Moe Clark. The album was recorded over a three year period that saw Jackson narrowly escape death in a hunting accident, and traces his path to newfound perspectives on life through love and gratitude… friends and family.
Starry Skies Opened Eyes is a record of resonance, transformation and re-emergence—of Jackson losing himself in the blackness between light, drifting through dark horizons, reflecting the sky. This introspective illumination unfolds in a dream-like flow of cosmia, echoing out over the album’s 11 tracks.
Silver Jackson is the musical alias of multi-talented Tlingit/Aleut artist Nicholas Galanin. Starry Skies Opened Eyes, Jackson’s second album, is an effortless evolution of his style and aesthetic, where electronic-inflected, acoustic folk experiments abound with clever melodic turns and spiralling harmonies, fading and swimming through percussive clicks, crackles, and looping rhythms. Recorded over a three year period that saw Jackson narrowly escape death in a hunting accident, the album traces his path to newfound perspectives “on life through love and gratitude...friends and family”. Starry Skies Opened Eyes is a record of resonance, transformation and re-emergence—of Jackson “losing [himself] in the blackness between light”, drifting through dark horizons, reflecting the sky. This introspective illumination unfolds in a dream-like flow of cosmia, echoing out over the album’s 11 tracks.
Jackson traverses the shifting sonics of this polyvocal landscape with melodic dialogue textured by a host of collaborators, including Samantha Crain, OCnotes, Benjamin Verdoes, Jesse Hughey, Vox Mod, and Catherine Harris-White. It is the sound of a future-now, where Indigenous presence is an act of creation, continually being renewed.
-RPM.FM
Music - Silver Jackson - Starry Skies Opened Eyes ft. Moe Clark
silverjackson.com
galan.in
Credits:
Directors - Nicholas Galanin & Dylan McLaughlin
Director of Photography - Dylan McLaughlin (vimeo.com/dylanmclaughlin)
Timelapse star footage - Renan Ozturk
Woman in Water - Merritt Johnson
Woman in Car - Liberty Yablon