Jeremiah Day & Aaron Hughes

6:00pm – Aaron Hughes: Tea

8:00pm – Jeremiah Day: To a Person Sitting in Darkness

Note: Space is limited to only 20 guests for Tea. Please RSVP by emailing aarhughes@gmail.com

There is no such limitation for the second part of the evening.

Emily Harvey Foundation is pleased to present an evening with Jeremiah Day and Aaron Hughes, a juxtaposition of two individual projects that each in different ways take up the personal and human-scale to find new strategies of depiction and narrative, sketching the contemporary landscape of war and peace. Day’s tapestry-collage of music, projected images, movement and speech is counter-posed with Hughes’ concentrated tea ceremony. Following upon a series of presentations together in Europe last winter, Emily Harvey Foundation is pleased to host the first US chapter of this ongoing dialogue.

To a Person Sitting in Darkness: accompanied by Dutch electric guitarist Bart de Kroon this slide-show / music / speech / improvised dance performance draws upon the history of the short lived "American Anti-Imperialist League" as the basis for investigating and evoking the organization of war and anti-war. Taking Kaiserslautern, Germany – the key logistical bridge between the US military and the Middle East – as a point of departure, Day re-examines how these vast systems inter-lock into individuals worlds, how the war comes (from) home.

Hughes's Tea performance is “an ongoing dialogue that traverses a variety of landscapes. From the tea sipped at a family gathering, to a cage in Guantanamo Bay, to a motor pool in Iraq, tea is not only a favored drink but a shared moment that transcends cultural divides and systems of oppression.”

Aaron Hughes is an artist, activists/organizer, teacher, and Iraq War veteran, whose work seeks out poetics, connections, and moments of beauty, in order to construct new languages and meanings out of personal and collective traumas. He uses these new languages and meanings to create projects that deconstruct systems of dehumanization and oppression.

He works with a variety of art, veteran, and activist organizations and projects including: Warrior Writers Project, Dirty Canteen, National Veterans Art Museum, Iraq Veterans Against the War, Justseeds Artists’ Cooperative, and Center for Artistic Activism. He has shown his work throughout the United States and internationally in museums and galleries to include: Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Maruki Gallery, Tokyo, Japan; School of Visual Arts Museum, New York, NY; Open Engagement, Portland, OR; Ashkal Alwan, Beirut, Lebanon; Craft and Folk Art Museum, Los Angeles, CA; The Milwaukee Art Museum, Milwaukee, WI; among other locations. He received The Claire Rosen and Samuel Edes Foundation Prize for Emerging Artists for his work on the Tea Project.

This is the second presentation of Jeremiah Day's work at Emily Harvey Foundation following an evening several years ago shared with Fred Dewey and Simone Forti. Day’s practice integrates photography and an improvisational, moving/talking performance method into an idiosyncratic and personal mode of description. The historical and the political are re-examined through embodiment, incarnation and encounters with sites of memory. This evening Day is accompanied by Bart de Kroon, a Utrecht, Netherlands-based musician who also possesses degrees in Psychology and Genocide Studies and who frequently collaborates with Day on solo guitar and dramaturgy.

Day graduated from the art department of the UCLA 1997 and lived and worked in Los Angeles until moving to Europe in 2003 to attend the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam. Currently based in Berlin, recent exhibitions and performances have included the Centre George Pompidou in Paris, the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin and last summer's Thessaloniki Biennial. His work is in the collection of Frac Champagne Ardenne and the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam amongst others and Day is represented by Ellen de Bruijne Projects, Amsterdam and Arcade, London.