Sparkle Taffy and LTKE invite you to join us in celebrating the Summer Solstice with an evening of performances of movement, language and sound. The event is the fifth in an ongoing series titled Markings, created to commemorate meaningful occurrences and dates. This year the Northern Hemisphere will experience its longest day on June 20th when the poles of the Earth reach maximum tilt and the Sun “stands” in relation. We look forward to sharing this time with you and the bright days that follow.

LTKE is a site-unspecific “curatorial” project which exists as a fermenting organism whose purpose is supporting the cultivation of artists. LTKE catalyzes new connections, provokes productive complications, and provides temporary homes for artists and their ideas. Striving to facilitate interesting encounters which counter an increasingly ubiquitous techno-capitalism, LTKE believes in the power of the moving image, the printed word, and the somatic action. Lauren Klotzman is the current primary custodian of the project.

Laurel Atwell has been performing and making work since graduating from Sarah Lawrence College in 2008. Her work and collaborations have been presented at MoMA PS1, Baryshnikov Arts Center, Danspace Project, Movement Research at Judson Memorial Church, Center for Performance Research, Gibney Dance, Abrons Arts Center, Dixon Place, as part of Sundays on Broadway, Performa ’11, as well as in Los Angeles, CA, Marfa, TX, and Minneapolis, MN. She has worked with luciana achugar, Phoebe Berglund, Kim Brandt, Milka Djordjevich (for which Atwell received a 2018 Bessie nomination for her performance in ANTHEM), ryen heart, Ursula Eagly, Nikima Jagudajev, Melanie Maar, and Melinda Ring, among others. Laurel runs an apothecary out her apartment where she teaches qi gong, practices reiki, administers tattoos, and offers divination readings. Recently, Atwell participated in the 2022 Maumaus Independent Study Program in Lisbon, Portugal, beginning a project that attempts to decipher the new perceptions of reality, desire, and mortality thanks to the internet. @affirmation.machine

Earthen Clay's cooperative architectures provide us glimpses into the pleasures of material and lived relationality. Neither exclusively sculptural nor relegated to pigmentation, the beginning of one set of assembled decisions is the ending of another. Here we are the spectator of a complex orchestra of physicality, containing time, sweat, earnest organic material, essence, and glitter.

Kevin Hernández Rosa (b.1994, Caguas, Puerto Rico) is an sculptor, writer, and educator living and working in Hartford, CT and Queens, New York. He received an MFA from the Yale School of Art in sculpture in 2021 and will be serving as a Visiting Assistant Professor at the Hartford Art School in the 2024-2025 academic year. Hernández Rosa’s artwork has been exhibited at D.D.D.D. Gallery (Manhattan, NY), Mayfield, (Chicago, IL), Austin Art Center (Trinity College, Hartford, CT), Fall River Museum of Contemporary Art (Fall River, MA), Hunt Gallery (Toronto, Ontario, CA), Weather Proof (Chicago, IL), Hatred 2 (Brooklyn, NY), Slought Foundation / Public Trust (Philadelphia, PA), M23 (Manhattan, NY), Ely Center of Contemporary Art (New Haven, CT), 891 N Main (Providence, RI), LeRoy Neiman Gallery (Columbia University, Manhattan, NY), Hill-Stead Museum (Farmington, CT), Chelsea College of Art and Design (London, UK), and Art Lot (Brooklyn, NY). His poetry has been published on Tagvverk, Beautiful Days Press, and Can We Have Our Ball Back?. In 2020 his was the recipient of a Art and Social Justice Initiative Grant as well as a Critical Practice Research Grant from the Yale School of Art. His first book titled ‘brandishing, EX-WRITER, etc.’ was published in New Haven by Bench Press in 2018. He was a 2021 Graham Foundation co-grantee for a collaborative project titled “VAULT”. He is the 2024-2025 Jackie McLean Fellow at the University of Hartford and is slatted to have solo exhibitions at Rogue Car Gallery (New York, NY), Hunt Gallery (Toronto, Ontario, CA), as well as KAJE (Brooklyn, NY) within the next coming year.

Ross Wightman is a New Haven based sound artist from New Jersey whose work incorporates microtonality, electro-acoustic multimedia composition and instrument building. He repurposes and deconstructs found instruments, augmenting them with 3D printing, robotics, and machine learning to compose works that investigate themes related to performance practice, virtuosity, timbre and resonance. For this event, Ross will be performing his invention, Fiddle Henge, a robotically controlled array of four violins mounted on a 24” bass drum that is played by a motorized acrylic disk. Inspired by the mechanical musical instruments and automata from the turn of the 20th century that were forced into obsolescence by the invention of phonographs and recorded music, Fiddle Henge serves as a medium to conjure rhythmically dense mechanical textures and microtonal sonorities that flicker between harsh noise and spectrally lush drone. Learn more at rosswightman.net and on IG @r_ss_w_ghtm_n

Molly Zuckerman-Hartung is a painter and writer who grew up in Olympia, Washington and participated in Riot Grrrl in her formative years. She attended the Evergreen State College in the 1990s. This introduced her to holistic structural ideas about aesthetics and politics. She worked in used bookstores and bars until her thirties, when she moved to Chicago and attended the School of the Art Institute for graduate school, and now she is working and taking walks in Norfolk, Connecticut with her wife, Fox Hysen, and dog, Moses. She is opening attention to Buckthorn roots, depth psychology, differance, climate change, ecosystems, permaculture, New England textiles, transfer stations, rhythm, Sun Ra, the effects of soul lag on humans, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets, the color of light on water, and the emotional landscapes of students, friends and strangers alongside whom she lives. She has shown at The Blaffer Museum in Houston, TX, The Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, The Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, The 2014 Whitney Biennial, Kadel Willborn in Karlsruhe, Germany etc. In 2021 she opened a mid-career survey show at the Blaffer in Houston, Texas, Comic Relief, accompanied by a monograph. She was a full time senior critic at Yale School of Art until 2021, and she is now teaching part time at Yale and SAIC, as well as low res MFA advising at various schools around the country. She is a frequent guest lecturer at many schools across the country, including, in the past few years, Princeton University, The University of Texas at Austin, Cranbrook, University of Alabama, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago Low Residency Program, and Columbia University. Her work is in the collection at The Walker Museum in Minneapolis, The Carnegie in Pittsburgh, The Booth School of Business at University of Chicago, and the Berkeley Art Museum. She will be presenting “A Few Notes on 'Some Notes on Disorganization' or 'The Double Bind of Order.'”