Performance art takes center stage at the Chrysler Museum glass studio

Virginia Commonwealth University professor Bohyun Yoon and musical performer Kishi Bashi will collaborate during the inaugural “Glass Theater” using glass instruments, vocals, and feedback loops .

This evening at 7 PM (EST), the glass studio at the Chrysler Museum of Art in Norfolk, Virginia, will be the setting of an ambitious program to cultivate performance art using glass. The event, entitled “Phantom,” is part of the studio’s regular third Wednesday series of events open to the public, but it is also, more significantly, part of an ongoing project titled “Glass Theater.” Co-curated by artist and Chrysler glass studio manager Charlotte Potter and artist Kim Harty (the former managing editor of GLASS: The UrbanGlass Art Quarterly), the “Glass Theater is a theatrical space for invention, discovery and experimentation,” according to the project Website. While taking place at a glass studio, the event is clearly aimed at breaking down boundaries between materials, and includes sound artists, musical performers, writers, and photographers, to name just a few of those participating in the first event. Also from the Website: “The Glass Theater fosters interdisciplinary collaboration and aims to break down boundaries between craft, performance and critical discourse.” While all about breaking out of boxes, the organizers do state that participating artists will be “informed by hot glass” in some manner.

Jocelyne Prince will explore illusions during her performance this evening.

Tonight’s program is chock-full of provocative conceptual performances, including Jocelyne Prince‘s work entitled “Pepper’s Ghost,” referencing a phenomenon which has recently become well-known during a posthumous “appearance” of the rapper Tupac Shakur during a performance at the Coachella music festival, in which a video was projected onto a sheet of glass creating the illusion he was onstage. Prince plans to recreate the 19th-century illusion named for its inventor.

Robin and Julia Rogers

Also on tap is a collaborative musical performance featuring Bohyun Yoon and Kishi Bashi. Entitled “The Three Faces of Tom Phan” Yoon and Bashi will use glass instruments, vocals and feedback loops to perform a live composition layered with different sonic elements looped and layered into a sound tapestry. Artists and Chrysler Glass Studio staff Robin and Julia Rogers will perform “Journey,” which seeks to recreate the “the ominous atmosphere of a nighttime rain storm in a city of lights.” A combination of old radio recordings, video projection and glass, the performance seeks to transport the audience though time, and through their own subconscious, to some primordial state.

IF YOU GO: