Michelle Nagai + Kenta Nagai
Brooklyn-based composer Michelle Nagai utilizes sound, physicality and concept to create site-specific performances, installations, radio broadcasts, dances, walks and other interactions that address the human state in relationship to its setting. These works and activities explore the exchange of perception between performer and audience/viewer. Nagai recognizes transmission, reception and “limbo” as continuously shifting, highly interactive states of being. She engages these states in her working process in order to open up the field of perception and action beyond that which she is herself capable of comprehending, making or doing.
Kenta Nagai’s work aims to suggest a different point of view for the listener, so that an unnoticed sound in the background may evolve into music, while a more standard mode of presenting sound is skewed to keep audiences from settling into a familiar pattern of listening. He collaborats frequently with artists working in dance, theater and film. Through these collaborations, the boundaries of Nagai’s sound work erode, allowing a deep exploration of audience/performer relationships, orientation of audiences in the space and distribution methods of sound.
Kenta Nagai’s work aims to suggest a different point of view for the listener, so that an unnoticed sound in the background may evolve into music, while a more standard mode of presenting sound is skewed to keep audiences from settling into a familiar pattern of listening. He collaborats frequently with artists working in dance, theater and film. Through these collaborations, the boundaries of Nagai’s sound work erode, allowing a deep exploration of audience/performer relationships, orientation of audiences in the space and distribution methods of sound.