Join us for an evening of immersive sound art at Park-Like on the summer solstice. New York-based artist, composer, and performer Jeremy Toussaint-Baptiste presents Looking At (Isn’t Just Looking). He describes this artwork as “…. a complicated love song for complicated people in a complicated place…” The composition features field recordings from St. Louis that were taken around Cherokee Street by Toussaint-Baptiste in 2019. Bring a blanket, snack, and your preferred beverage to lounge and listen.
A recorded livestream is available below. The recording reflects the light changing on one of the mirrored sculptures in Chloë Bass’s exhibition Wayfinding. Toussaint-Baptiste was a contributing reader for the site-specific audio artwork that accompanied Wayfinding when it was originally organized for The Studio Museum in Harlem. He has been invited by Bass to contribute to the programming for Wayfinding‘s St. Louis installation. Both artists refer to legacies of minimalism as an artistic movement—making space for contemporary Black realities and challenging ideas of pure form as neutral. They have had a long-term relationship as friends and have collaborated on several occasions. This is their first large-scale collaboration.
Jeremy Toussaint-Baptiste (b. 1984) considers notions of errant relations which thrive across subjectivities. He was a 2017 Artist-in-Residence at ISSUE Project Room and received a Bessie Award in 2018 for Outstanding Music Composition and Sound Design. Toussaint-Baptiste has presented visual and performance work at MoMA PS1; Performance Space New York; The Brooklyn Museum; The Kitchen; Issue Project Room; The Studio Museum in Harlem; The Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia; FringeArts, Philadelphia; Tanz Im August at Hau3, Berlin; Stoa Cultural Center, Helsinki among others. Toussaint-Baptiste is a founding member of the performance collective Wildcat!, and frequently collaborates with performers and visual artists. He is currently an artist-in-residence at Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts in Omaha.