The Things that Disappear in the Distance
Performance

Based on an actual event held in New York City, by the painter Frederic Church in 1859.

The performance begins with the slow unraveling of a stitched image on giant curtains made from painters’ canvas. The image depicts the interior of a 19th century study. Once the image has been pulled away from the canvas, the curtains are drawn, to reveal a fourteen-foot ink drawing of Haines Falls, a popular subject for the Hudson River school. This image is composed on many sheets of paper, which are slowly dismantled piece by piece. As each piece of paper is taken away, the image begins to fall further and further into abstraction. As the process continues and the entire drawing is dismantled, the audience is exposed to yet another hidden image, a small photograph of the moon. This dramatic series of revelations echo a journey from the interior/micro to the exterior/macro.