LUX PHANTASMATIS
PAVEL ZUŠTIAK and KEITH SKRETCH
LUX PHANTASMATIS
Public preview
Durational Kinetic Audiovisual Installation
Sunday, June 27th – Wednesday, June 30th
On view to the public 3:00pm-7:00pm each day
*Entrance to the building requires a face mask
Bohemian National Hall, 4th floor
321 East 73rd Street
New York, NY, 10021
Public preview of Lux Phantasmatis, a large-scale kinetic and audiovisual installation by award-winning artists Pavel Zustiak and Keith Skretch. The installation hovers at the intersection of sculpture, choreography, and machine art. Initially intended for exhibition in New York theaters shuttered by COVID-19, Lux Phantasmatis is a product of the pandemic. It emerges as a living embodiment of a world devoid of human intervention against the backdrop of global standstill.
Creative team: Pavel Zustiak, Keith Skretch, Christian Frederickson, Joseph Silovsky, Ryan Holsopple, Christina Tang, Sandra Garner, Joe Levasseur, Marek Soltis, Libor Mlynar
Originally crafted as performative scenography for Palissimo Company’s dance production HEBEL—one of countless shows postponed indefinitely due to COVID-19—the installation takes center stage in the show’s absence, a literal “ghost light”* illuminating dark performance spaces. Like its theatrical namesake, Lux Phantasmatis embodies a presence within absence, matter within a void.
The installation’s automation, LED display, and sonic output are governed by custom data-driven programming, drawing on input ranging from the astronomical calendar to the proximity of human bodies in the room. In this way, the Machine responds uniquely to each space and onlooker, albeit in a timeframe that falls outside of casual observation. Similar to an extraterrestrial visiting planet Earth, it is responsive but uninterpretable.
Lux Phantasmatis is a Palissimo production supported by NYU Skirball. Funding support is provided by Mertz Gilmore Foundation, Edith Lutyens and Norman Bel Geddes Design Enhancement Fund of ART NYC, New Music USA, and, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.
*A ghost light is an electric light that is left energized on the stage of a theater when the space is unoccupied and would otherwise be completely dark. The light is usually placed near center stage. Many theaters forced to close during the COVID-19 pandemic have renewed the tradition of ghost lights as a way of indicating that the theaters will reopen.
PAVEL ZUSTIAK is a Slovak-American choreographer, director, and designer. Described by critics as humane and searing, his interdisciplinary works are visually evocative, emotionally piercing, and immersive for audiences and performers alike. He is fascinated by the landscape emerging at the intersection of perception and presence, physical and unseen, as well as highly crafted and spontaneous. Zuštiak’s work aims to destabilize audiences’ assumptions, stir a discourse and prompt to transformation. The Bessie Juried Award winner for his “poetic layering of movement and visual imagery, conceiving the stage as a decentralized world in which the corporeal body is the focus and canvas for a wide range of human expression,” Zuštiak also received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Princeton Arts Fellowship, a Lower Manhattan Cultural Council President’s Award, MANCC and Bogliasco Fellowships, a NEFA/NDP Production Grant, and multiple Princess Grace Awards. Zuštiak’s works were commissioned and presented in the US and Europe by Cal Performances at UC Berkeley, Walker Art Center, Wexner Center for the Arts, Abrons Arts Center, Baryshnikov Arts Center, La MaMa, PS122, New York Live Arts, Archa and Slovak National Theatre among others. Zuštiak is the director and founder of PALISSIMO Company and resides in NYC. palissimo.org
KEITH SKRETCH is a Los Angeles-based media artist and theater designer fascinated by the ways images and the world encounter each other. His video design for Mallory Catlett’s Obie-winning This Was The End was recognized with Henry Hewes and Bessie design awards, and he and Catlett subsequently adapted the stage production into the immersive installation ARCHIVE (EMPAC, CultureHub NYC). Other theatrical video designs include Memory Rings and Falling Out (Phantom Limb Company), Decoder (Catlett), Magdalene (2020 Prototype Festival), Fantômas: Revenge of the Image (CalArts Center for New Performance, Wuzhen Theater Festival), Time Alone(Ovation Award, Belle Rêve Theatre Co.), Painted Bird Part II: Amidst and Weddings and Beheadings (Palissimo), and Radiolab Live (BAM), and he designed original scenography for Palissimo’s pandemic-postponed HEBEL. He’s collaborated with Pulitzer-winning composer Ellen Reid, with visual artists Kenyatta Hinkle and Christen Clifford, and with composer and guitar whiz Sarah Lipstate. His installation works have been presented in New York, Los Angeles, San Diego, and Warsaw, and his stop motion wood cut animation “Waves of Grain” has received over 750,000 views since going viral in 2014, receiving coverage in outlets including Colossal, Gizmodo, Huffington Post and Creators Project. He holds a BA from the University of Chicago and MFA from CalArts. keithskretch.com
