Susie Ibarra WATER AND STONE
Exhibition at REDCAT
A survey of field recording and composition focused on water
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Apr 24 - June 27, 2027
Susie Ibarra WATER AND STONE
Artist Susie Ibarra invites audiences into a meditative study on human connections to ancient and present-day life inside the historical waterways stretching from Colorado into Baja del Sur, Mexico. Drawing inspiration from the materiality of water and stone, Ibarra sculpts a sound installation expanding on the compositional process of her new LA Phil-commissioned opera The Water Dreams of Animals, premiering at Walt Disney Concert Hall on May 25, 2027.
The sonic studies and visual surveys that have informed The Water Dreams of Animals will be presented to listeners and viewers in Ibarra’s Water and Stone exhibition. The Pulitzer Prize-winning composer has been researching and recording the sounds of water and stone throughout the last six years across the connected Yampa and Green Rivers of the Uinta Mountains of Fantasy Canyon and Dinosaur Monument in Colorado and Utah, out to the Gulf of California in La Paz and La Ventana in Baja del Sur. This installation is shaped from her field recordings of marine life, music notes inspired by the natural pitches of canyons and ocean, processions along Jurassic-era canyons and surveys of the desert flora and fauna found along these southwestern waterways. Prototypes of several new sculptural instruments inspired by Eocene Era lithophones played by Ibarra’s CHAN percussion will also be on view. The exhibition will be rounded out with the work of two featured Los Angeles-based artists engaged in water inquiries to complement Ibarra’s multimedia offerings.
LA Phil Insight is generously supported by Linda and David Shaheen.
This project is supported in part by the David C. Bohnett President’s Discovery and Innovation Fund.
With support from Creative Capital Foundation and The Muriel Pollia Foundation. Special thanks to the DAAD Berliner Künsterprogramm for technical sound support.
Co-presented by REDCAT
Sponsored By
Artists
Susie Ibarra
With poet Jeffrey Yang, I am composing a score that steps into the magical lives of ancient animals, such as the Eocene Epoch river turtles and dawn horses of the canyons, out to the Gulf of California, where today the vibrant marine life continues with whale sharks and mobula rays and their desert companions of the cottontail, sandhill crane and water ouzel. How have these landscapes shaped our beings through the movement of sound in water and stone? Who were the animals that lived here before and what is left for their current descendants? What do they bring through the passage of many historic water river systems?
REDCAT
631 W 2nd Street Los Angeles, California 90012
Attend the concert
Visit the installation, then catch the premiere of The Water Dreams of Animals on May 25, 2027.
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