What I captured here isn’t about art, not really, it’s about that vanishing fucking species called intimacy in the age of calculated spectacle. I was there. I saw it happen.
Ryan Tacata’s hammer piece… the repetition, the physical commitment, the way duration becomes its own argument against everything quick and consumable. That’s the kind of work that doesn’t translate, that refuses to be content. My camera caught the sweat and the ritual, but what I felt was that rare thing where someone commits their body to an idea until the idea becomes flesh. Mesmerizing because it demands I stay present, because it won’t give me an exit.
But Meklit, yeah, she stole it. Because when someone that good strips it down to voice and bass in a living room, I’m not watching a performance anymore. I’m in something. The walls close in, not claustrophobic but conspiratorial. No arena reverb to hide behind, no lighting cues to tell me when to feel. Just her and the wood of that bass and however many people crammed in there breathing the same air. That’s not a concert, that’s a séance.
My photographs catch people mid-transformation, Yula Paluy suspended in whatever private negotiation she’s having with gravity and self. Tiffany Trenda projecting outward while the room pulls inward. What’s gorgeous and sad is knowing these salons are a kind of endangered ecosystem, people still willing to show up, sit down, shut up, and be there for something that won’t trend, won’t scale, won’t even necessarily make sense by morning.
I documented the resistance. The refusal to be elsewhere. That’s the real performance.
A mini-concert from Meklit Hadero a performance projection from Tiffany Trenda, a performance sculpture by Ryan Tacata and a new piece by Yula Paluy.
Navigation:
“Before the flowers of friendship faded friendship faded.” Another Gertrude Stein truth bomb, and yeah, that’s about right for where we were by #5. Things were already falling apart in ways we couldn’t admit yet. The full story of all fourteen nights is documented elsewhere if you’re into watching things disintegrate in slow motion.
Salon #6 is next. We kept going because what else were we going to do?
Or go back: Salon #4, the one with the Gertrude Stein quote about failure.