Brainchild Part 3
Begun in 2008, Brainchild is Johnson’s nine-part, multi-year fiction and sound project. For each successive part of the sci-fi story, she collaborates with a guest composer who creates a choral work for performance. Johnson’s narrative follows a girl, Brainchild, who discovers the abandoned structures of an ancient civilization and slowly begins to understand her own strange connection to its builders. Finding musicality within the language of the Brainchild text itself, composer Mark So has created a score for Part 3 comprised solely of the words on the page, arranged and notated into open
fields, dense clusters, and single lines to produce what So calls a “native” reading. Part 3 will premiere at HDTS at the Mars Desert Research Station, a Mars analog site where Johnson was in residence in 2004 to study the landscape and its use in preparing for
life on Mars. The work will subsequently be presented at LAXART in Los Angeles.
Cast: Dominique Cox as Brainchild
Chorus: Julie Brody, Kate Brown, Mari Garrett, and Gabie Strong
Costumes: Kelly Marie Conder
Site: Mars Desert Research Station
OCTOBER 9, 2015 - OCTOBER 12, 2015
High Desert Test Sites heads to Green River, Utah for our next “big” event, HDTS: Epicenter.
Following the epic HDTS 2013 event, which took us on the road to Albuquerque, New Mexico, we are turning our focus in 2015 to the communities and contemporary art programs in rural Utah. For our next event we will be partnering with Epicenter, a Green River-based organization founded in 2009 by a group of architectural designers, in the spirit of Samuel Mockbee’s visionary Rural Studio. We are inspired by the energy and vision at Epicenter, and by the ways in which they provide resources to local residents through active involvement in their intimate community.
HDTS: Epicenter is a collaborative curation of artists’ projects, along with many regional points of interest and programs in diverse locations in and around the rural Utah community of Green River. Participating artists include:
Steve Badgett
Cabin-Time
Alyse Emdur & Michael Parker
Butchy Fuego & the Seeing Trails DFA (Division of Fine Art)
Kathleen Johnson & Mark So
Alison Kinney, Daniel Nickerson, Cyrus Smith & Matt Takiff
Nicole Lavelle
Charlie Macquarie
Allan McCollum
Jordan Topiel Paul & J. Gordon Faylor
Ephraim Puusemp, Kiersten Puusemp & Raivo Puusemp
Bennett Williamson
