The Shed’s first artist in residency, Christopher Petersen, presents the culmination of his time in the space during the April 2019 Georgetown Art Attack.
Artistic Collaboration with Maia Veague
a theatrical work… an electronic media drama in which both music and images will be visceral, clearly articulated, forceful and at times violent. THE BEAST (a creature caught between man and beast) believes a poetic theory that if one dies while dreaming, that dream becomes infinite. He fantasizes a beautiful ‘beast woman’ who, blind and armless, falls in love with him. The ending aria is their final love moment in which he dies in his sleep. Her ending lullaby acknowledges both the death and the eternal dream.
Inspired by Morton Subotnick’s “The Last Dream of the Beast”
A 20′ by 20′ space filled with 11,000 sheets of paper, some fur, some candles, 3 fingers. The installation was a guided sharing of the space. Groups of at most four people were lead into the space around its perimeter and then asked to sit in one of the four chairs located in the middle of the space. Once seated they were prompted to simply become aware of the space around them by seeing what they could see and listening to what they could hear. After 5 minutes of awareness the space was then opened up for exploration and audience could walk around and take in the space from any point in the room. The goal of the installation was to at first let the audience sit in the space allowing their minds to wander without any proposed questions, and second to allow the audience to be in the space how they wanted and to get an opportunity for exploration.
ChristopherWPA 