/artist.studio
New commissioned work for the BBC/Tectonics Festival in Glasgow.
Cutout [6×6] Roads / Drives / Avenues / Junctions / Paths / Carts
Music: Close Scrape (Adam Linson, Matt Wright)
Visual Art: Maya + Rouvelle
Curated by Ilan Volkov (Conductor, BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra), and Alasdair Campbell (Creative Producer ACProjects/Alternative Currents)
2021 — CinematicVR / Maya + Rouvelle collaboration.
This is a 2D trailer for a CinematicVR/ambisonic realization of Christopher Trapani’s End Words for voices and electronics.
This project will be available for most VR headsets via Steam in April ’21.
Music : Christopher Trapani
Performers : Ekmeles
Visual Art : Maya + Rouvelle
Poetry : Anis Mojgani, They Raised Violins (movement I)
Ciara Shuttleworth, Sestina (movement II)
John Ashbery, The Painter (movement III)
from Maya + Rouvelle /
Our intention was to create an uncanny world where Trapani’s music, its poetry and our visuals are symbiotic. The passageway to this environment is nature, filtered through the lens of Trapani’s work; spiraling between the familiar and the dream-like.
from Christopher Trapani /
I’ve always been fascinated by the sestina:
this archaic form, thirty-nine lines
that spin out in an intricate spiral.
Six-line stanzas, with six end words
that repeat in a predetermined shape.
Those patterns were begging for music.
So I started looking for poems to set to music,
and bought an anthology of sestinas.
“The Painter” was an old favorite, and the unusual shape
of Anis Mojgani’s poem—the way he streamlines
crisp, hallucinatory images and tender words—
drew me into a propulsive yet nostalgic spiral…
Predictably, things began to spiral
out of control when I started to imagine the music
I’d devise for Ashbery’s words.
“The Painter” turned into a sort of ur-sestina
setting: I started with thirty-six lines
of related natural harmonies, laid out in the shape
of a six-by-six grid. Then I shaped
the harmonic progression as a spiral
traced through that plane, drawing curved lines
that wander though disjointed consonance—music
laid out so that adjacent stanzas of the sestina
share a repeated harmony over repeated end words.
Line numbers are embedded in the words
as durations. Another grid shapes
the map of shifting tempi—so the sestina
has influenced all the piece’s parameters. The spiral’s
hypnotic rigor invades all aspects of the music.
With the singers, I prerecorded many lines,
syllables, and effects, for the electronics—lines
to chop up and retune, and sometimes single words—
to create collages of vocal sounds. The music
for “They raised violins” started to take shape
with “bones,” “string,” “petals”— each node in the spiral
set to a unique texture. And Ciara Shuttleworth’s “Sestina”
was the perfect compact shape: just six one-syllable words
whose meanings shift as the spiral unravels, lines
that fray as the sestina thins to stark, still music.
2020 — visual art for performance of Monteverdi’s Vespers — a maya + rouvelle collaboration.
Our studio created the visual art for for the March 1, 2020 performance of Monteverdi’s Vespers at Shriver Hall in Baltimore. The performers included the Baltimore Choral Arts Society, Washington Cornett and Sackbutt Ensemble, Baltimore Baroque Band, and Peabody Renaissance Ensemble, all conducted by Blake Clark.
Our video project included entirely original footage shot in Italy, Spain, and the US. Some of the imagery is based on, and includes excerpts from works by Fra Angelico, Andrei Rublev, Jan Van Eyck, Aert van der Neer, Mosaics from the Basilica di San Marco, Venice, and The Osservanza Master.
The complete videos we made for each movement with the Vespers conducted by John Eliot Gardner, as well as some writing on the project are here. Still images from the concert are here.
2018 — installation — a maya + rouvelle collaboration.
pulse, drift, ping, echo is an installation for the Cooper-Hewitt’s The Senses: Design Beyond Vision exhibit curated by Ellen Lupton and Andrea Lipps.
The individual glass pieces were made at a residency at the Museum of Glass in Tacoma, a residency at Pilchuck Glass School and at UrbanGlass in Brooklyn.
In addition to kinetic and sonic qualities produced by electromagnetism, this new installation includes a haptic section where visitors can touch the glass and feel resonant frequencies pulsing through specific objects.
Inspired by the translucence of glass, our work embodies invisible forces indexed in the shapes, behaviors and sensual qualities of each object. Electromagnetism and code influence the movements of round neodymium magnets inside some of the pieces. The resulting sounds reveal unique acoustic properties.
from the exhibition label:
“Inside two display cases are glass volumes in the shape of cones, domes, and droopy tubes. Tiny metal spheres roll around inside the vessels, tapping lightly against the glass. These little spheres are powerful magnets. Installed underneath the tabletop are electromagnets. The tiny spheres change direction when the electromagnets switch their polarity from north/south to south/north. Created by Lili Maya and James Rouvelle, the piece sounds delicate and irregular, like falling rain.
Some glass shapes are exposed on the tabletop. Artists Lili Maya and James Rouvelle created this special touch component of their piece especially for this exhibition.”
The work is also featured in the exhibition catalog, available here: http://shop.cooperhewitt.org/p/8615/The-Senses-Design-Beyond-Vision
2018 — installation — a maya + rouvelle collaboration
The translucence of glass – the ability to see through a solid form, has always interested us. In our previous work with glass we explored sound as another less visible aspect of the medium – but a quality with enormous physical resonance and emotional power. The invisibility of sound waves, their coupling with the physical realities of the objects that create them, and the translucence of glass are, for us, situated at the border of understanding and imagination.
Curated by Benjamin Wright, our new work for Pushing Buttons @ UrbanGlass can be understood as a tableau — a portrait, but a portrait absent of a specific, human subject. Yet the evidence of a presence, the things that would be around a person, or a group of persons, are all there. An absence is perceived in an act of both observation and imagination. This is a kind of transparency of a foundational structure that to us is analogous to glass.
The relationship of Artifice and the natural world is at the center of Caesura. Yet the natural world, represented by replicas, appears authentically only in video on tiny screens. The electronics, glass and other manmade components are presented in various contradictory situations as if the persons who inhabit this world have lost a clear sense of a conflict between organic and inorganic, between reason, and fantasy.
Caesura is not a synthesis, it is an amalgam. The irregular rhythm of the metronome, placed within the tableau at the scale of a monument and covered in a large symmetrical glass bell with a funky handle, suggests that one’s reason is prone to produce mysteries and data in equal measure. Perhaps pitting these aspects against each other is obscuring a perception of the invisible, formative structures of which we are a part, and within which conflict is an illusion.
Full Flickr set/video here.