Test Pattern 06: Dorian Wood

As part of their Test Pattern residency, multi-disciplinary artist Dorian Wood presents Mares Ocultos, a new composition that centers on themes of erasure, anxiety, and transgression. Divided into 3 movements, Mares Ocultos combines field recordings, video, interviews, and a rotating cast of performers, including Virginia-based musicians David Dominique, Jon Kassalow, and Elijah Hall.

Followed by a conversation with artist, writer, and VCUarts professor Jonathan Molina-Garcia.

Can’t make it to the ICA? The event livestream can be viewed here!
 

Test Pattern is a hybrid performance series that invites visiting artists to use the ICA auditorium as an experimental production studio, inspired by the legacy of public access TV and alternative video movements in the US.

During each week-long residency, the artists will collaborate with members of the local community, transforming the ICA auditorium into a space for music, movement, activism, and deep conversations. Each week will culminate in a live performance and broadcast.

Test Pattern presents the public with a unique window into the creative process, to observe rehearsals, participate in live tapings and online streams of the performances, and to later access each episode in its final form.

Dorian Wood (pronouns: she/they) is a multi-disciplinary artist based in Los Angeles. Using subject matter informed by her own perspective as a genderfluid brown person, a child of Costa Rican and Nicaraguan immigrants, and an autodidact, Wood’s intent of “infecting” spaces and ideologies with her artistic practice is born from a desire to challenge traditions and systems that have contributed to the marginalization of people. Her work has been showcased in concert halls and performance spaces around the world, including at institutions like The Broad (Los Angeles), REDCAT (Los Angeles), Museo Nacional Del Prado (Madrid), and Teatro de la Ciudad Esperanza Iris (Mexico City).  From 2019 to 2020, Wood completed several successful tours throughout Europe, Mexico and the U.S. with her chamber orchestra tribute to Chavela Vargas, XAVELA LUX AETERNA. In 2022, Wood debuted her tribute to the singer Lhasa De Sela, LHASA, at the Festival Internacional de Arte Sacro in Madrid. Wood is the recipient of a 2020 Creative Capital Award and a 2020 Art Matters Foundation grant. She has released over a dozen recordings, most recently the albums Invasiva (2022) and 2020’s back-to-back releases ARDOR and REACTOR.

David Dominique is a composer, performer and music theorist living in Richmond, Virginia. He is the 2022-2023 recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in Music Composition, and the 2021-2022 Frances B. Cashin Fellow at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute. His compositional output includes contemporary chamber music, jazz, electroacoustic music, installation, rock and theater.

Elijah Hall is a multi-instrumentalist and singer/songwriter with a heavy concentration in cello and vocal performance. A Hampton Roads native, he studied cello performance in Richmond as an undergraduate in VCUarts Department of Music. He has performed at both Carnegie Hall and dive bars with the same enthusiasm and skill. This will be his 4th collaboration at the ICA, after Richard Kennedy’s “Touch of Elegance” opera, Benae Beamon’s “Time Blackened for the Capture of Dawn”, and Moor Mother’s Test Pattern performance this past summer.

Jon Kassalow found a home in the city’s independent music scene after moving to Richmond to attend VCU’s school of music . Eventually this built itself into a multi-decade career that spanned several venues, studios and groups. As a culmination of many years spent recording music and touring internationally, in 2020 Kassalow founded the SANS Studio and Performance Space where they continue their focus on experimental music and art.