07/07/2025
Three weeks ago on a Saturday, if you had wandered into The Carnegie art galleries you would have found something perhaps a little unexpected. Instead of the usual hush of a contemporary art exhibition, there were musical instruments being unpacked. Someone carefully arranging small objects on a table: tools? Relics? Both? You would have seen a musician walking in slow arcs across the floor, feeling out acoustics. A poet scribbling in a notebook, curled in a corner with a pillow and a jar of water. It was unclear where the exhibit ended and the rehearsal began.
This was Part 1 of Practice as Ritual, a two-part collaboration between the International Foundation for Contemporary Music and gallery curator Sso-Rha Kang, shaped in response to the exhibition Notations on Ritual. The premise was simple: invite a group of artists into the gallery not to perform, but to work. Let their artistic practice (and the associated rituals that make up said practice) be visible. Let the public wander through it, to overhear it, misinterpret it, and respond to it themselves.
For musicians and poets, practice is often private. It takes place far from the gaze of an audience. It is repetitive, uncertain, sometimes obsessive. It is not necessarily graceful. But it is also where the shape of a work begins to form, and where the artist begins to understand their own response to a place, a sound, a prompt, a set of ideas.
On Saturday, July 12, from noon to 1:30 p.m., the same artists who put their practice on view will return to the gallery. This time, they will perform -- not a traditional concert, and not a fully scripted sequence of poems or pieces, but a collaborative expression shaped by the public rehearsal that came before it. Their performance will not explain the exhibition, nor summarize it. But it may illuminate the strange, slow process of coming to terms with a ritual... someone else's or your own.
About the performers: Allen Otte is a legendary percussionist and founding member of some of the world's most influential percussion ensembles, known for his exploratory approach to sound, text, and object. Jenn Howd is a vocalist, composer, and interdisciplinary artist whose work draws from q***r ritual, experimental theater, and extended vocal technique. Elese Daniel is a poet and essayist whose writing often lingers in the blurred spaces between observation, memory, and embodied experience.
The event is free and open to the public.
Practice as Ritual (Part 2): Gallery Practice Sessions
Saturday, July 12, 2025
12:00-1:30 p.m. (music begins at noon)
The Carnegie in Covington, KY
Curated by Sso-Rha Kang and Brianna Matzke
Presented in collaboration with the International Foundation for Contemporary Music
With support from The Taft Research Center and 12 Paws Pickle Ball Club
