18/50 Kathryn Elkin

4 May-10 May 2015

Overview

Kathryn Elkin’s new commission ‘The Elephants in the Room’ merges modes of improvisation with immediacy of response in the form of a collaboration between the artist and the musician Okkyung Lee. As a conversation point and a reference for Lee’s improvisation they worked through the adagietto from Mahler’s 5th Symphony, which was famously used in Visconti’s masterpiece Death in Venice. Elkin worked with artist Lucy Parker shooting the film, with cellist Richard Thomas acting as a sound recordist. Parker and Thomas lend their own interpretations of Elkin’s intentions in documenting the sessions with Lee, each negotiating their own role in the studio set-up. Lee’s canny understanding of Elkin’s interest in the score and its associations as well as her understanding of the dualism of her role in the film at hand - as composer and as performer/subject - makes for a broad range of collaborative harmonies and dissonances.