2017 Events

Kathleen Johnson: Brainchild, Part 4,
with Composer Laura Steenberge 

Sunday, January 8, 2017 at 4 pm sharp Armory Center for the Arts

Dominique Cox as Brainchild, and Carolyn Chen, Heather Lockie, and Argenta Walther as The Others

Costumes by Jill Spector

Begun in 2008, Brainchild is Kathleen Johnson’s ongoing, nine-part collaborative fiction and sound project. For each successive part of her story, the artist collaborates with a different guest composer who creates a choral work for performance.

The story follows Brainchild, a girl who discovers the abandoned structures of an ancient civilization, and slowly understands her own strange connection to its builders. Through an intercessor, Brainchild begins her awakening and subsequent communion with these forces, as mysterious overseers and attendants monitor her progress with unease.

Drawing on Johnson’s 15 years of experience in a close-knit science fiction reading group and passion for experimental music, Brainchild is simultaneously modest in tone and ambitious in scale, and still not halfway complete. For Brainchild, Part 4, presented at the Armory Center for the Arts, composer and multi-instrumentalist Laura Steenberge has created a layered a cappella score for the waning daylight of the Armory’s art studio space.

    • See Facebook Event

    • See Performance on Flickr

Laura Steenberge’s work considers the relationship between language and music, informed by studies of harmony, acoustics, perception, linguistics, mythology, and ritual. She has developed similar site-specific performances at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Hammer Museum, the Sutra Baths, the Cantor Arts Center, and other venues. She received her MFA from CalArts and DMA from Stanford University.

In addition to Brainchild, Kathleen Johnson’s practice has included photography, drawing, sculpture, and architectural collaborations. She received her BFA from Otis Art Institute and MFA from the University of Southern California.

This performance is scheduled on the closing day of our fall exhibitions: Radio Imagination: Artists in the Archive of Octavia E. Butler and Harry Dodge: The Inner Reality of Ultra-Intelligent Life.