Emily Mast

4030 N. Figueroa St. Los Angeles, CA 90065 mastonfig@gmail.com

VIDEO
PRESS

Continuous Wave, 2019/2020, performance
with Antoni Eubanks, Christine Morse, Kayla Bourne & Loris Jones-Randolph
Costumes: Nancy Stella Soto
Graphic design: Tom Comitta
Production: Frieze LA, Ruinart & Proper Santa Monica

Continuous Wave produces missed and mixed messages, offering mysteries that hover just beyond what can be immediately grasped. Guests are invited to submit five-word responses to the poetic prompt: “what message would you leave the world if you were out at sea?” A translator then converts a selection of these messages to Morse code – a string of dots and dashes – that three professional singers transform into short songs. Layering the language in this way gives it expressive potential that is quite different from, yet still related to, the images and emotions evoked by the messages-in-a-bottle provided by guests. The different representational systems in Continuous Wave — language that is written, coded, and sung, live performance, graphic abstraction — all inject mystery, desire, and levity into the communicative act. As with much of Mast’s practice, the work proposes language as an inherently collaborative project that distributes and defers meaning as much as it conveys it.