Gray Sound: Charmaine Lee
The Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry continues the Gray Sound series with a performance by Charmaine Lee.
Charmaine will perform live, followed by a discussion of her process, techniques, and inspirations for her practice of improvisation, moderated by Gray Sound curator Seth Parker Woods. Audience members are invited to participate in the post-performance conversation.
CLICK HERE FOR LINK TO LIVE STREAM
Click here for a glimpse of Charmaine Lee's previous performance at The Kitchen in November 2018.
About the artist:
Charmaine Lee (b. 1991) is a New York-based vocalist from Sydney, Australia. Her music is predominantly improvised, favoring a uniquely personal approach to vocal expression concerned with spontaneity, playfulness, and risk-taking. Beyond extended vocal technique, Charmaine uses amplification, feedback, and microphones to augment and distort the voice. She has performed with leading improvisers Nate Wooley, id m theft able, C. Spencer Yeh, and Ikue Mori, and maintains ongoing collaborations with Conrad Tao, Victoria Shen, Zach Rowden, and Eric Wubbels. Charmaine has performed at ISSUE Project Room, the Kitchen, Roulette, The Poetry Project, and MoMA PS1, and participated in festivals including Resonant Bodies, Huddersfield Contemporary, and Ende Tymes. She has been featured in group exhibitions including The Moon Represents My Heart: Music, Memory and Belonging at the Museum of Chinese in America (2019). As a composer, Charmaine has been commissioned by the Wet Ink Ensemble (2018) and Spektral Quartet (2018). In 2019, she was an Artist-in-Residence at ISSUE Project Room, and is an upcoming 2021 Van Lier Fellow at Roulette. Charmaine is currently a member of the Editorial Board of Sound American.
About Gray Sound:
Envisioned as an ongoing performance and discussion series, Gray Sound represents a chance for artists and the broader community to tease the boundaries of sound—when it moves from voice to music, from a recognizable tune to noise.
This year, in the midst of the ever present global pandemic, we as a people are looking at the hard truths of who we are as a public. Themes of identity, place, ownership, environment, noi(z)e and care run rampant in the news, blogs and creative work that has surfaced since March 2020. For the 2020-21 season of Gray Sound, Seth Parker Woods has curated a cohort of artists whose creative practices explore multiple convergences of the aforementioned ideas, and whose latest output, either in text/sound formatted interviews or new performative work, is presented to our global audience for reflection and alignment. We look forward to sharing these events with you from our homes to yours.