Project

A thick, sticky atmosphere settles over Grant Street, spilling from Northlight Gallery into the air. Sweet scents of blue raspberry, green apple, and cherry cola mingle into something indistinguishable yet familiar, reminiscent of theme parks and gas station convenience stores.

Inside, a chorus of voices sings in unison over a tinny MIDI track, performed by an orchestra of Polar Pop cups, electric boxes, and urban bronze sculptures. Through open calls shared via posters, social media, and word of mouth, we invite anyone to lend their voice. Every First Friday, this invitation comes alive on the back porch of our apartment on Roosevelt Row, where a temporary karaoke station awaits. Participants are invited to sing, be recorded, and give voice to the animatronic orchestra, and later attend the show as guests of honor.

Applying Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of the carnivalesque, this work contaminates the gallery space with a cacophony of voices, scent, and visual noise in the form of a dark ride, a contained universe blending a bar aura and the streets of Phoenix into the gallery space.The project challenges traditional hierarchies of contemplation by colliding two distinct communities, First Friday attendees and the art-academic audience of Northlight Gallery, transforming aesthetic reception into a shared, participatory experience.

The gallery becomes the site of the final clash, where these communities converge to witness a spectacle of robots, dissolving dualistic separations and reuniting opposites, heaven and hell, sacred and profane, high and low, great and small, clever and stupid, in chaotic, shared encounter.