The online premiere screening of Mendi + Keith Obadike’s new work LIFT co-presented with Artspace New Haven.
On Friday February 12th 7PM, the CCAM Sound Art Series will host an online premiere screening of Mendi + Keith Obadike’s (@mendiandkeith) new work LIFT which is co-presented with Artspace New Haven (@artspacenh) The screening will be followed by a discussion with the artists and a Q and A with the virtual audience via Zoom.
“LIFT (Listening Skies) is a music and video work. It is a meditation on both the history of aerial photography and the one hundred year old song often called the Black National Anthem, Lift Every Voice and Sing. In this work, Mendi + Keith were particularly inspired by the aerial images captured by the African-American engineer Shelby Jacobs’ camera system aboard Apollo 6 spacecraft in 1968 and the celestial references found in the melody and text composed by brothers J. Rosamond Johnson and James Weldon Johnson. The Johnson brothers originally wrote Lift Every Voice and Sing for school children. Early in his life, Jacobs could have been one of these school children whose horizon was literally expanded by this song.
In this work, Mendi and Keith use cameras mounted to balloons and drones to capture images from the sky and merge those with original music and text inspired by this great secular hymn.”
Image by Mendi + Keith
This event is free and open to all. Zoom link here: https://yale.zoom.us/s/98302188111
The CCAM Sound Art Series is Curated and Produced by Ross Wightman (@ugly_ross)
This event was co-organized by Lisa Dent from Artspace New Haven