Today Is Your Birthday
Exhibited at Art Center’s DTLA Gallery as part of their Love’s Remedies Initiative
Showcased at the Virtual ArtNight Pasadena 2021
Devised and created through supportive exchange with BRD from Love’s Remedies
Soundscapes developed in collaboration with Sound Designer, Avery Orvis
Technical direction provided by Tom Orvis
Installation support from Christina Valentine
Load in and installation assistance from Tom Orvis, Avery Orvis and Art Center
“Today Is Your Birthday” is an inquiry into the labor of both forgetting and remembering across generations.
Five, interconnected rooms, each with their own unique soundscape, trace overlapping family histories across the Atlantic. From the Great Famine in Ireland to the coal mines in Pennsylvania to the daily grind of a modern-day 9 to 5, it all culminates in one event: the birthday. A demarcation of individuality, originally intended as a celebration of survival, the birthday is both the largest and the smallest day of the year. Created through a collaborative process built upon an exchange of individual and shared living histories, "Today Is Your Birthday" asks what it means to survive and thrive in the United States of America.
This series of scripted spaces is a post-immigration story for a post-Trump reality, a rumination on American whiteness, and a reflection on the impulse to position our identities within the mythos of the past. Painstakingly recreated, photo-realistic environments collide with psychological landscapes, stage sets and sculptural elements to form an absurd odyssey of epic proportions, effectively encapsulating two hundred years of events within the minutiae of one simultaneously mundane and exquisitely precious moment.
Virtual Walk Through with Embedded Video
Turn up speakers and enlarge to full screen for best experience.
By Chapter:
Today Is Your Birthday | Introduction: The Great Frontier
Today Is Your Birthday | Conclusion: Surprise!
Today Is Your Birthday | Chapter 1: The Sea & the Sky
Today Is Your Birthday | Chapter 2: The Farm & the Mine
Today Is Your Birthday | Epilogue: Surprise Again!
