Art from all angles at IU Art Museum with Dreaming in Darkness
By Emily Jenson Powell
December 9, 2008
This winter, the IU Art Museum presents Dreaming in Darkness, a performance piece integrating the light display of the IU Art Museum’s Light Totem, choral music performed by an ensemble of IU Jacobs School of Music students and theatrical movement performed by students from the IU Theatre Department.
Bloomington community members are invited to hear — to experience — the music of McClellan, Saint-Saëns, Whitacre and others in a free, 30-minute multi-sensory performance on the south entrance courtyard of the Indiana University Art Museum at 7:30 p.m. Friday and Saturday evenings, A reception in the museum’s Solley Atrium will follow the performance each evening.
Countless composers claim to see sounds and hear colors — neurologists call this phenomenon synesthesia. Breaking classical music boundaries, Dreaming in Darkness, conceived by the Luminescence Project, takes you inside this synesthetic world, crafting landscapes of light, color, emotion and sound.
Multi-sensory performance art, a continually evolving genre, aims to stimulate audiences’ eyes, ears, and emotions to create penetrating and intense new compositions and performances. Dreaming in Darkness merges musical, theatrical and visual narratives into a single performance of light and sound that interweaves powerful images of the transformative forces of darkness and color.
As Mark Doerries, Luminescence Project founder and artistic director notes, “Dreaming in Darkness paints a rich, sonorous description of the night, when new colors, shadows and images of the natural world — not visible to us beneath the sun’s rays — are revealed.”
Located in the heart of the Indiana University campus on Seventh Street and ranked among the foremost university art museums in the country, the IU Art Museum’s soaring triangular atrium leads guests to galleries filled with extraordinary original works of art — from ancient gold jewelry and African masks, to paintings by Monet and Picasso and much more.
Current special exhibitions, on view only until Dec. 21, include The Grand Tour: Art and Travel, 1740 — 1914, and African Currency: Hoe Blades, Bracelets, and More. In addition to a variety of monthly talks and programs, “New in the Gallery” installations showcase selections from among the 30,000 objects in the Art Museum’s internationally acclaimed collection. Plus, every Saturday at 2 p.m., a free gallery highlights tour is offered. Free weekend parking is always available at the Jordan Avenue parking garage. Visitors should check for special holiday hours and programming at www.artmuseum.iu.edu or call 8855-5445.
Make your holiday gifts count as a gift to your community with the Alliance of Bloomington Museums. Museum gift stores offer a wide range of specialized holiday merchandise, including hand-crafted works from Indiana artisans and from around the globe, brain teasers and science kits, art books and works, clothing, jewelry and more. All the museums carry unique “stocking stuffers.” No admission is charged to browse at any of these museum gift stores at the IU Art Museum, the Kinsey Institute, the Mathers Museum of World Cultures, the Monroe County History Center, the SoFA Gallery Friends of Art Bookshop and the WonderLab Museum of Science, Health and Technology.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Emily Jensen Powell is marketing manager for the IU Art Museum.
The IU Art Museum is a member of the Alliance of Bloomington Museums, a group of cultural organizations offering big city variety with a small town welcome. Members include the Farmer House (336-5597); Hilltop Garden & Nature Center ((855-2799); Hinkle-Garton Farmstead (336-0909); Indiana Geological Survey (855-7636); Indiana University Archives (855-4495); Indiana University Art Museum (855-5445); Kinsey Institute (855-7686); Lilly Library (855-2452); Mathers Museum of World Cultures (855-6873); Monroe County History Center (332-2517); The Sage Collection (855-4627); SoFA Gallery (855-8490); John Waldron Arts Center (334-3100); WonderLab (337-1337); and the Wylie House (855-6224).
The Indiana University Jacobs School of Music would like
to thank the Herald Times for permission to republish this review.
