&Now 2015: Blast Radius

This is a collaborative image-music-text performance/reading that responds to the experience of female aging. Faced with linguistic and literary traditions that lack the rich vocabularies to describe female aging, we juxtapose different mediums and genres within these mediums to express this liminal space. The piece’s hybrid form reflects an attempt to suture a language in order to shape an artistic body corresponding to the processes that constitute a shifting identity. The title refers both to the rose's traditional and mythic associations with feminine beauty and also to the completion of a passage between succumbing and becoming. 

Received notions of beauty are a central theme in this piece, signaled in part through the recurring image of a rose. This traditional and mythic symbol of feminine beauty dates back at least to the Roman de la Rose (1230), in which a rose and a woman merge. This piece also engages standard notions of beauty through its formal construction, which questions the traditional aesthetic values of continuity, coherence, and symmetry. 

We hope to express an aspect of female experience for which our language is incomplete by juxtaposing and interweaving lyric, narrative, sonic, and visual elements; to create an artistically sound and persuasive home for a perspective on female aging that falls outside the currently prevailing social norms.

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Matthew Carey collaborated with Shira Dentz in the expansion of her poem in Rose Secoming, “Sisyphusina,” into a multi-media piece.   He is an artist residing in Troy NY, where he is pursing a Masters in Electronic Arts. While formally trained as a composer and pianist, his interests lie in all forms of self-expression, performance, and art dealing with ecologies.