February 24, 2021

Save the Date

Photos: Amadeus Julian Regucera.

Photos: Amadeus Julian Regucera.

How might an intimate relationship to sound, frequency, and vibration inform how we participate in shaping collective change?

Open Space is delighted to announce Sarah Cargill’s Lucid Dreams of the Apocalypse, a performance series and digital collaboration sponsored by the San Francisco Arts Commission and presented by SFMOMA’s Open Space, in collaboration with the museum’s Public Engagement department.

Lucid Dreams of the Apocalypse launches here on March 2 with a series of contextualizing video essays and culminates Friday, March 19 at 6 p.m. in a special broadcast on SFMOMA’s YouTube channel, followed by a live Q&A with the artist. The broadcast is free and open to the public, and ASL interpretation and live captioning will be provided.

Centering improvisatory experimentation, creative intimacy, process, memory, and Black temporalities, the series features three Bay Area sound artists investigating sonic interaction as an embodied liberation practice for co-creating new realities. Performing artist and cultural worker Sarah Cargill is joined by two core collaborators: composer and scholar Amadeus Julian Regucera and percussionist, installation artist, and sound engineer Leviathe. Together, they function as a deconstructed ensemble, reimagining the possibilities of ensemble-based instrumental performance.

The series leads up to a White Box performance in which Cargill introduces Pluto Noir to the public. Echoing the lineage of Drexciyan tales of the Black Aquatic, Pluto harnesses vibration to activate and recover lost memories. Armed with frequency conductors and a looper pedal, Pluto forges a partnership with the element of water to transport memories across dimensions and temporal planes.

Open Space has had the pleasure of supporting Sarah Cargill’s work on several occasions, beginning with “Decolonizing the Orchestra,” a 2018 conversation with Kelly Lovemonster, and most recently when Cargill was the featured solo performer at our 2019 summer art party. It’s a privilege to continue this support, particularly at a time when live performance faces so many challenges. We are committed to collaborating with local artists and arts organizations to present and contextualize time-based art.

Lead Artist

Sarah Cargill (she/her/they/them) is a performing artist, cultural worker, writer, and freelance curator whose work articulates and is the alchemical consequence of Black interiority, somatic memory, and queer intimacies. Exploring these relationships through the spectrum of sound and silence is central to their practice.

Sarah is a recipient of the San Francisco Arts Commission’s Individual Artist Grant for the 2020-2021 grant cycle and was the inaugural fellow for SOMArts Cultural Center’s Curatorial Residency Program. She has completed fellowships with San Francisco’s nonbinary and women of color writing collective The Ruby (2019), San Francisco Bay Area Emerging Arts Professionals (2017), and The Gardarev Center (2016). They have written for publications including SFMOMA’s online and live platform Open Space and Montclair State University’s Peak Performances Journal.

Sarah was one of San Francisco Queer Cultural Center’s 2015-2016 grantees and has curated interdisciplinary showcases including Drawing Lineage; Building Legacy (2016), an intergenerational QTPoC (queer and trans of color) centered chamber music project featured at the 19th Annual National Queer Arts Festival; and But Tell Me What It Feels Like: The Erotic Practice of Liberation (2018), a three-day experimental performing arts festival exhibited at SOMArts Cultural Center. She has appeared as a soloist in numerous productions including Queer Rebels (2013), Stories of Queer Diaspora (2014), and SOMArts Cultural Center’s The News (2016). In her work as an educator and arts advocate, Sarah has worked as a teaching artist with young musicians in the Bay Area and Chicago, and has served as a member of the Board of Directors for Bay Area Girls Rock Camp in Oakland (2015-2017). She currently resides on unceded Ramaytush Ohlone land (Yelamu), in her hometown of San Francisco.

Collaborating Artists

Leviathe (Lien Do) is an engineer, music producer, and sympathetic resonance researcher based in San Francisco. Originally from Sacramento, CA, Leviathe grew up on punk, jazz, and ska, which pushed them to pursue a B.A. in Music at UC Davis, where they took the classical route in ethnomusicology/percussion performance. During that time they became deeply ingrained in the college freeform radio station KDVS 90.3fm, which exposed them to experimental electronic music, recording and creating music on different DAWs, and film. They joined Different Fur Studios in 2015. They are also an in-house producer for Text Me Records and work as a composer and post-production film engineer with Matthew Pereira under the name LIEMA. Other work includes being a contributing writer to Tom Tom Magazine, contributing drummer to Keith Urban’s Escape Together World Tour, and a contributing artist to SOMArts Festival But Tell Me What it Feels Like, focusing on the physics of the harmonic series. They were recently nominated for Best Music Score for a feature film at Queen Palm Film Festival.

The work of Amadeus Julian Regucera (b.1984) engages with the embodied and acoustical energy of sound and the erotics of its production. Amadeus has had the opportunity to present works around the world: notably at the ManiFeste (Paris, France), the Festival Musica (Strasbourg, France), Voix Nouvelles (Asnières-sur-Oise, France), the Resonant Bodies Festival and the SONiC Festival (NYC), and as part of the American Composers Forum artist delegation to Cuba. His music has been performed by Ensemble Linea, Alarm Will Sound, Ensemble Intercontemporain, the Left Coast Chamber Ensemble, Eco Ensemble, Duo Cortona, and Third Sound, among others. In addition to concert music, his practice intersects with visual and performance art, most notably in the pieces IMY/ILY (2018-19) for solo percussionist; The trauma you keep safe is the pain your pass along (2018) for flutist, performer, and video; and the installation/performance Communication (2013), at the Kulturzentrum bei den Minoriten in Graz, Austria. Amadeus holds degrees in Music from the University of California, San Diego, and the University of California, Berkeley, where he lectures in the Department of Music. He currently serves as the Artistic Production Director for the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players and UC Berkeley’s Eco Ensemble.

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