Katinka Kleijn
Special Effect
Najee Zaid
Join us at the Music in the Garden Festival Season 3 at Elastic Arts Foundation!
Music in the Garden presents a 2-day music festival with Chicago-based improvisers and creative musicians, featuring an art installation by Christina Sadovnikov inspired by the works of Moki Cherry and a feature film by Gabe Udofia.
Come enjoy a night of music and rest. This event is the perfect opportunity to relax, unwind, and feel a sense of community after the 2024 election season.
$15 / $10 w/ Student ID
$25 Two Day Pass / $15 w/ Student ID
Agenda
8pm Katinka Kleijn
9pm Special Effect
Sarah Clausen, Tyler Wagner
10pm Gabe Udofia Film Premiere
Gabe Udofia, Caroline Jesalva, Aaron Kaufman-Levine
10:30pm Najee Zaid
Artist Bios
Najee-Zaid Searcy is a Chicago (Council of Three Fires Confederacy) born interdisciplinary artist with a focus on performance and identity. Najee-Zaid uses their background in music, facilitation, and informal arts learning to explore the intersection of space and identity within the context of healing modalities through their bodies of work. Najee-Zaid’s latest works combine elemental and plant ancestries with the human experience while hybridizing their performance acoustically, electronically, and spatially with a range of accessible sensory activations. Learn more at najeezaidsearcy.com
Hailed by The New York Times as “a player of formidable expressive gifts,” Katinka Kleijn enjoys a genre-defying, interdisciplinary career. Classically trained, she cultivates an exploratory practice at the intersection of improvisation, composition, visual art and performance art. Much of Kleijn’s work illuminates the cello’s anthropomorphic qualities, often by placing the instrument in thought-provoking new contexts. In 2019, Kleijn and cellist Lia Kohl waded with 30 cellos in Chicago’s Eckhart Park Pool for their devised work Water On the Bridge. Similarly, Kleijn’s The Body as a Variable Resistor (2021) shares a 9V synthesizer circuit between a cello and its player. Kleijn often presents her projects as co-constructions with the performer or audience, as in her situation-based composition Forward Echo, for 11 improvisers (2019), performed at Big Ears Festival by Ensemble Dal Niente. A Drag City recording artist, Kleijn is a member of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and International Contemporary Ensemble, and presented solo multimedia presentations at North Carolina Performing Arts, Library of Congress, and the Momentary at Crystal Bridges American Museum of Art.
SPECIAL EFFECT is a collaborative project between improvisors Sarah Clausen and Tyler Wagner, combining their sensibilities honed in acoustic improvisation with their affinity for electronic music (ambient, dance, and otherwise). SPECIAL EFFECT juxtaposes minimal techno drum machining with live processed saxophone and bass, wide-ranging samples and synthesizers to create an ethereal secret-third-thing transcending between realms.