Today Is Your Birthday, supporting Eli Smith, ArtCenter DTLA, 2021
Through supportive exchange and in a subordinate role, BRD from Love’s Remedies helped Eli Smith create Today Is Your Birthday, an inquiry into the labor of both forgetting and remembering across generations.
Five interconnected rooms trace overlapping family histories across the Atlantic. From the Great Famine in Ireland to the coal mines in Pennsylvania to the daily grind of a modern-day 9 to 5, it all culminates in one event: the birthday. A demarcation of individuality, originally intended as a celebration of survival, the birthday is both the largest and the smallest day of the year. Built upon an exchange of individual and shared living histories, Today Is Your Birthday asks what it means to survive and thrive in the United States of America.
Painstakingly recreated, photo-realistic environments collide with psychological landscapes, stage sets and sculptural elements to form an absurd odyssey of epic proportions, effectively encapsulating two hundred years of events within the minutiae of one simultaneously mundane and exquisitely precious moment.
Today Is Your Birthday is ultimately about dangerous play: the addictive process of mythologizing the past, even when doing so obscures the present and undermines the imminent future.
Credits:
Devised and created through supportive exchange with BRD from Love’s Remedies; Soundscapes developed in collaboration with Sound Designer, Avery Orvis; Technical Direction provided by Tom Orvis; Installation support from Christina Valentine, Load in and installation assistance from Tom Orvis, Avery Orvis, and ArtCenter crew.
For more information including a virtual tour, see Eli Smith’s site, ArtCenter’s site, and the Love’s Remedies site.
Through supportive exchange and in a subordinate role, BRD from Love’s Remedies helped Eli Smith create Today Is Your Birthday, an inquiry into the labor of both forgetting and remembering across generations.
Five interconnected rooms trace overlapping family histories across the Atlantic. From the Great Famine in Ireland to the coal mines in Pennsylvania to the daily grind of a modern-day 9 to 5, it all culminates in one event: the birthday. A demarcation of individuality, originally intended as a celebration of survival, the birthday is both the largest and the smallest day of the year. Built upon an exchange of individual and shared living histories, Today Is Your Birthday asks what it means to survive and thrive in the United States of America.
Painstakingly recreated, photo-realistic environments collide with psychological landscapes, stage sets and sculptural elements to form an absurd odyssey of epic proportions, effectively encapsulating two hundred years of events within the minutiae of one simultaneously mundane and exquisitely precious moment.
Today Is Your Birthday is ultimately about dangerous play: the addictive process of mythologizing the past, even when doing so obscures the present and undermines the imminent future.
Credits:
Devised and created through supportive exchange with BRD from Love’s Remedies; Soundscapes developed in collaboration with Sound Designer, Avery Orvis; Technical Direction provided by Tom Orvis; Installation support from Christina Valentine, Load in and installation assistance from Tom Orvis, Avery Orvis, and ArtCenter crew.
For more information including a virtual tour, see Eli Smith’s site, ArtCenter’s site, and the Love’s Remedies site.
