The Vanderbilt University Fine Arts Gallery is pleased to present Dream for Light Years , a two-year collaboration between California-based painter Ali Smith and Blair School of Music professor of composition Michael Alec Rose.
On March 19, join us inside the Fine Arts Gallery for an exhibition of oil paintings by Ali Smith, along with the debut performance of a composition by Michael Alec Rose, made specifically with Smith’s large-scale canvases in mind. A quartet of distinguished faculty of the Blair School of Music will be performing together, amidst paintings by Ali Smith: Molly Barth (flute), Stephen Miahky (violin), Jeremy Wilson (trombone) and Felix Wang (cello). John Warren, film artist and lecturer in the Department of Art at Vanderbilt, will produce a video of the in situ performance, to be experienced during the run of the exhibition.
Visual artists and composers have long engaged in dynamic dialogues. The exchange of musical ideas and visual aesthetics were famously vibrant in the collaborations between Claude Monet and Claude Debussy, Wassily Kandinsky and Arnold Schoenberg and other artists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The artist Ali Smith and composer Michael Alec Rose continue this conversation into a new millennium, allowing the Vanderbilt community and wider Nashville public a window into their process. We look forward to the opportunity to see and hear how one art form can give sustained attention to another, while attempting to translate not only the specific features, but also the essence of an artwork, from the language of one medium to another.