WASH

Wash is a site-specific score and music video composed for a car wash. It will be the first in a new video series that explores the contemporary connections between moving images and transportation, focused at first on car culture and the the contradictions of the automobile in contemporary life. Wash inverts the typical music video creation and distribution process, composing a score to accompany the car wash that will be playable for anyone traveling through the machine. The score will incorporate music and sound that references the ecological, mechanistic and design aspects of car washes, while also incorporating local musical culture and sound from the communities around the car wash venue. The project has three components--an online score publically available as an accompaniment for car wash patrons, an opening concert, and a music video documenting the score available for global viewing. The project is led by visual artist Agustina Woodgate, in collaboration with Miami-based composer and conductor Teddy Abrams, public curator and writer Stephanie Sherman, and Miami-based musicians.

Alabamaland

Deep in the backwoods of rural Alabama, Herbert Jones, a 94-year-old black man, clings to his 688-acre farm--a farm that was passed along to his slave ancestors from the family’s former slave master. Despite the farm’s unique history and place in the Jones family, urbanization and the lure of the city threatens this way of life. Alabamaland is a documentary that chronicles the day-to-day life on Herbert’s farm, explores the history of small-scale black farmers in the South, and examines the overall state of American farming. 

Are there creative ways for this farm to survive? Are Southern communities interested in preserving this way of life, or do the economic struggles of Southern states like Alabama overshadow the preservation of local farm life? What does the future hold for small-scale farmers who have survived so much to keep their land and preserve their way of life? Alabamaland poses these questions and more as it investigates the state of farming in the South.

FELIZX

FELIZX performance-styled video on the life and work of deceased artist Felix Gonzalez Torres, during the last phase of his life, spent on Miami Beach in the early '90's using advice and archival material made available by his roommate of his last years, and best friend since 8th grade at San Jorge School in Puerto Rico, Claudio Gonzalez. 

Our focus is the relationship between Felix's highly personal art and his last 6 years spent here in Miami Beach during the peak of the AIDS Epidemic, which claimed his life in 1996, not long before life-saving anti-viral drugs, became available.

The emergent scene on Miami Beach in the late 80's and early '90's, where so many young men gathered to live out there last years, is as inseparable from the death sentence an AIDS diagnosis meant then, as it is from the work Felix created then, before the the anti-viral drugs appeared. 

Our mode of constructing the Piece include choreographed performative vignettes and original music based on the club music of the time and elements that refer directly to his work and South Beach at the time: strung lights, candy, billboards, beaded portieres, Drag Queens and Go-Go Dancers.

Moving Parts

Moving Parts will assemble 4-5 collaborators from varied disciplines to conceive and produce an original work of theater for a compact, portable stage (approx 4’ x 4’ x 4’). Through a series of meetings and workshops, the company will share ideas and develop set architecture/scene changes, a libretto/text, figurines/props, video/film projections, sound/music/voice and performance. The resulting work will be presented free of charge to the public at venues including public libraries, museums, and non-profits, especially targeting underserved community venues. Meetings will take place at Available Space in Little River, my new studio/exhibition space opening Feb 1. As Artistic Director of Moving Parts, I envision a new production annually, involving different collaborators from all possible disciplines. Moving Parts will present a unique theater of objects, architecture, sound and image using modest economic means. We will develop our own techniques and intimate mechanics, our own stagecraft, to experiment with figuration and abstraction, pictures and language, space and time, narrative and transformation. In a condensed, concentrated way, Moving Parts will expand the art and performance scene here, and be a new platform for artists to express themselves.