NIGHT GALLERY NORTH
2050 IMPERIAL STREET
SUNDAY, OCTOBER 1, 2023
6 PM
On Sunday, October 1, 2023, Tomashi Jackson will undertake a lip-synced embodied performance of the 1978 Doobie Brothers album Minute By Minute in its 36-minute-and-16-second entirety as her alter-ego Tommy Tonight, under the direction of Alexander Gedeon. Tommy Tonight will perform at sunset, embodying and responding to sonic collages of sounds of the ten songs, with emphasis on the lead and backup vocals of Michael McDonald woven with clips of conversations between Jackson and her late mother, Aver Marie Burroughs, recorded in 2010 as part of Jackson’s graduate research on domestic labor among their family of origin in Texas and California. The piece includes the live, spoken testimonials by Southern California intensive care nurse Karly Kodzis chronicling her experience as a health care worker contending with the death of patients due to the ravages of COVID during the height of the pandemic.
Tommy Tonight is a romantic male R&B singer styled after 1990s Black male love music groups and the icons of previous generations. Tonight emerged in the Summer of 2019 while Jackson was an artist participant at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Together with artists Ariel René Jackson, Nikita Gale, and Ashley Teamer, Jackson formed the boy band D’TALENTZ named after Octavia Butler’s text Parable of the Talents. Tonight has since appeared in Athens, Greece, Los Angeles, New York City, Cambridge, MA, The Baltimore Museum of Art, and the Great Sand Dunes of Southern Colorado. His lip-synced and embodied musical performances explore themes of love, liberation, and the complexities of living.
Wearing a mask is encouraged, and please stay home if you're not feeling well.
Please RSVP to rsvp@nightgallery.ca.
Tomashi Jackson (b. Houston, Texas, 1980) grew up in Los Angeles, California and is a graduate of The Los Angeles County High School for the Arts. She received her MFA in Painting and Printmaking from the Yale University School of Art in 2016; earned her Master of Science in Art, Culture, and Technology from the MIT School of Architecture and Planning in 2012; completed her BFA from Cooper Union in 2010, and is a 2019 alumna of the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture. She is the recipient of the 2023 Rappaport Prize awarded by the DeCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, the 2022 Roy R. Neuberger Prize from the Neuberger Museum at SUNY Purchase, and received a Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors Grant in 2020.
Solo museum exhibitions have taken place at the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, Denver, Colorado (Across The Universe), the Neuberger Museum at SUNY Purchase, Purchase, NY (SLOW JAMZ), Parrish Art Museum, Watermill, NY (The Land Claim) the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University (Brown II), both in 2021; the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio (Love Rollercoaster) in 2020; and the Zuckerman Museum of Art, Kennesaw University, Kennesaw, GA (Interstate Love Song) in 2018. Catalogs for the exhibitions at the MCA Denver, Neuberger Museum, Radcliffe Institute, and the Parrish Art Museum reflect the in-depth original research behind these shows as well as the exhibited works. Jackson’s work has been included in group exhibitions at the Martin Museum of Art at Baylor University, Waco, Texas, High Museum of Art, Atlanta; The Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Boston Museum of Fine Arts; the Baltimore Museum of Art; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, the Institute for Contemporary Art, Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, VA, and Mass MoCA among many others. Jackson was included in the 2019 Whitney Biennial.
Works by Jackson are in the collections of MOCA, Los Angeles; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Perez Art Museum Miami; the High Museum of Art, Atlanta; the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; the Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Boston Museum of Fine Arts; the Baltimore Museum of Art; the Parrish Art Museum, Watermill, NY; and the Studio Museum in Harlem, among others.
About the Director:
Alexander Gedeon is a deviser and director of contemporary opera and theater dedicated to generating soulful, transformational new work infused with the values of cultural justice. His recent credits include "Everything Rises" at Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM), a New York Times "Critics Pick" featuring violinist Jennifer Koh and bass-baritone Davoné Tines; "Sanctuaries" (Portland's Memorial Coliseum), a jazz chamber opera about gentrification; "Concerto for Having Fun with Elvis on Stage" (REDCAT); "The Double" (Synchromy); Olivier Messiaen's "Apparition de l'église éternelle" (Royce Hall); Georges Bizet / Peter Brook's "La tragèdie de Carmen" (San Diego Opera) and Julius Eastman's "Stay On It" (San Francisco Conservatory of Music). Alexander regularly associate directs operas for MacArthur Fellow Yuval Sharon and has collaborated on new productions by John Cage, Richard Wagner, and Anna Deavere Smith at venues including the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Detroit Opera, and Lyric Opera of Chicago.
As an interdisciplinary performer (actor/musician/mover), Alexander has performed nationally at venues such as New York's HERE Arts Center, REDCAT, and The Ford Theater with the Grammy-winning Billy Childs Jazz Chamber Ensemble and Lyris Quartet. In the early 2000s, Alexander led the New York-based trio Trick & the Heartstrings, creating a live show London's New Music Express called "a supertight howl of righteous rhythm and blues with jaw-dropping pop twists," signing to Warner Brothers UK with Grammy-winning producer Paul Epworth. The Los Angeles native is a graduate of New York University's Experimental Theater Wing and trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts in London.