Purring Tiger's Studio
NAME: Kiori Kawai and Aaron Sherwood
STUDIO LOCATION: 191 Stanhope St., 3R
TIME IN BROOKLYN: One year
SHARED STUDIO: Yes
[Editors’ Note: This coming weekend, we’ll be touring Brooklyn for GO open studios, an event in which visitors vote on which artist they feel deserves an exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum. As a service to both ourselves and other readers, we’ve scoured the event’s pages for the most promising studios and then sent those artists an email with a few questions about their work. The following posts relay what they told us.]
Purring Tiger, recent artists-in-residence at the Tribeca Performing Arts Center, combine projection and music improvised to dance movements. We don’t know much about choreography (we see a lot of arm motion), but the expressive narrative is kind of like the experience of watching a black-and-white silent movie with a piano to it. They may also be the only choreographers in this contest, so we thought that’s a good enough reason to chat with Aaron Sherwood, one part of the dance duo.
Where are you from? What’s your background?
Kiori is originally from Japan, and has a background in dance. I’m originally from North Carolina with a background in music.
Are you showing your work in galleries?
We haven’t shown our work in galleries yet. Last year we did a set of pop-up interactive street installations in various places around the city. We’ve mostly been doing performances.
Why are you participating in GO?
We’re participating in GO because we want to be part of the community in Brooklyn and share what we’re doing with those living around us.
How did you first begin working together? What made you realize that you would collaborate well?
When we first met we were both impressed with each other’s work and started batting around ideas of how we could collaborate. We really wanted to mix different art forms together and also create something that brought people together. Using a Microsoft Kinect, and alternately a webcam, we use peoples’ movements to help generate art in different ways. In our last piece, Water in the Desert, which we developed as artists-in-residence at the Tribeca Performing Arts Center, musicians improvised along with the sounds the dancers were creating.
We each see things in our own way, things that the other doesn’t necessarily see. This helps make the art better than anything that we could create individually. And I guess that’s the idea with including the greater public in making the art too—it’s a random element that coalesces in its own way, in its own individual moment in time, with anyone who comes to visit us.
