Hall, Meehan, Thomson Visiting Artists
This residency is in partnership with The Momentary. With this collaboration, LiA and the Mo are continuing to nurture the relationships they fostered during the 2022 Live in America Festival.
Based on a dream…
This residency is based on the impetus to exchange and engage in organic conversations between old friends with overlapping concerns and open-ended dreams. It is an opportunity to be with each other and to work independently and collaboratively. It’s about hanging together and seeing what catches our spirits.
Working together and separately, we’ll exchange recipes, laugh, play, and wander. Rest and travel excursions are embedded in our work ethic. Rhythms, questions, and contradictions will abound.
Sean Meehan
Residency Artist
Sean Meehan is a drummer whose work incorporates contemporary composition, improvisation, hybrids of these, and interdisciplinary collaboration. His work has been presented at a number of prestigious institutions including Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts (New York), INSTAL Festival (Scotland), Goethe House (Hanoi), and The Whitney Biennial, but he more frequently performs in artist-run venues and festivals.
Meehan has released a number of recordings as well as a series of objects intended to encourage meditation on sound. These include Audio, a boxed set of four cassette-like objects, and Field Recordings Vol. 3, a folio of printed matter that suggest and intone various sounds and sound events.
Trained as an urban planner Meehan also makes urbanist super 8 films in the tradition of planners such as William H. Whyte and Kevin Lynch who utilized that medium for their groundbreaking research. This work has informed a 20-year collaboration with Tamio Shiraishi on their annual summer concert series situated in a variety of marginal, heterotopic spaces throughout New York City. These were documented on two vinyl records (In the City (Fuestron), and Annual Summer Concerts (JD Stereo). The pair was invited by Scotland-based presenting organization ARIKA to, with the help of an embedded cartographer, develop a similarly motivated tour throughout the United Kingdom.
He is currently writing an analysis of New Deal architecture in the South Bronx, a long-form solo drum recording, a collaboration with cellist Theresa Wong, and a split 7” recording with Michelle Ellsworth.
Meehan is the grateful recipient of a 2020 artist award from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts.
David Thomson
Residency Artist
David Thomson is a Caribbean-American interdisciplinary artist whose practice centers on the interrogation of presence and absence in the performance of identity, using image, writing, performance, and installation as containers of inquiry. Thomson’s performance work has been presented and supported by The Kitchen, Danspace Project, Movement Research, Performance Space NY, The Invisible Dog, and The Lunder Institute of American Art. Awards and fellowships include US Artist, NYFA, Yaddo, MacDowell, Rauschenberg, and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts. He has had the pleasure of working and collaborating with Bebe Miller, Trisha Brown, Ralph Lemon, Tracie Morris, Sekou Sundiata, Marina Abramović, Kaneza Schaal, Deborah Hay, and Okwui Okpokwasili among many others. Recent projects include collaborating on Matthew Barney’s film installation, Secondary; a published essay in Yvonne Rainer’s Remembering a Dance: Parts of Some Sextets, 1965/2019 (Performa), and he is one of the contributing artists in Cane: A New Critical Edition (the3rdthing.press) for the 100th anniversary of Jean Toomer’s 1923 novel. In 2017, he initiated The Artist Sustainability Project to expand the practice and discourse of financial, artistic, and personal empowerment.
Ben Hall
Residency Artist
Ben Hall is a writer and composer based in and from Detroit, Michigan. He was profiled in Fred Moten’s 2017 book, Black and Blur, and frequently works as a critic with a research focus on the visionary American composers Milford Graves and Bill Dixon. He formerly served as a senior research fellow at the Center for the Advancement of Public Action at Bennington College from 2018-2022. He is currently compiling material for the forthcoming Black Liberation Music Guide.