Porch Swing Orchestra and Co-Lab Projects Present:
VAST IS THE SEA

January 20th through February 24th, 2024

All presentations are maximally 45 minutes long
There will be a 15-20-minute intermission between presentations
Each presentation is ticketed separately except for the opening night which is one combined ticket

February 17 - Sliding Scale Tickets
7pm Ariana Gomez
8pm Gavin Watts / The Reformers

February 23 - Members Only (become a member and get invited today!)
7pm A Night with Barry Stone and Friends

February 24 - Sliding Scale Tickets
7pm Jessica Mallios
8pm Thomas Hooper / Skloss


“Vast is the sea of hearing around the raft of vision.”
― Michel Chion, La Toile Trouee (Cahiers Du Cinema. Essays Collection)

Vast is the Sea is a series of presentations from eight artists whose diverse works are united by their explorations of images and sound. The title comes from a translation of the composer and film theorist Michel Chion's analysis of the relationship between sound and image in cinema. In their presentations, each artist constructs new oceans through live performances, video, and sound processing. Viewers are invited to gaze at visions projected on the ceiling and swim among the sounds in real time.

Porch Swing Orchestra is an art project begun by Barry Stone that explores the interplay between site-specific images, musical improvisation/chance operation, and field recordings. Pictures taken on-site accompany fleeting melodies recorded among conversations of passersby, the rattle of air conditioners, birdsong, sirens of cicadas, and all matter of environmental sonic phenomena. 

Most recordings take place on Stone’s front porch in Austin, Texas, but PSO has traveled to Spiral Jetty in Utah, the border town of Del Rio, Texas, Maine, the San Juan Islands, and performed live in the James Turrell Skyspace, The Color Inside as a part of The Univerity of Texas Landmarks Songs in the Skyspace Program. Since 2018, PSO has collaborated with dozens of musicians, artists, poets, writers, and activists to publish over 200 pieces.

All things PSO can be found at https://porchswingorchestra.org/

This project is supported in part by grants from the Cultural Arts Division of the City of Austin Economic Development Department, Texas Commission on the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, and H-E-B.

Beverly Penn and Barry Stone examine how we picture nature. Through digital and mechanical manipulations, Penn and Stone alter otherwise faithful representations of the natural world. Reprocessing their works either by rearranging the digital code in Stone’s photographs or performing a type of reverse-engineering to Penn’s sculptural works via 3-D modeling or casting, the traditional schema of what we perceive as natural or artificial is put into question. 

Beverly Penn was born in Baltimore and now lives and works in Austin.  She is the recipient of numerous fellowships including a Rockefeller Foundation residency in Bellagio, Italy; a Connemara Conservancy Artist Grant; grants from the Texas Commission on the Arts and a Fulbright Fellowship in Barcelona. Her work is represented in many private, corporate and public collections, most notably the Cooper Hewitt in New York, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Racine Art Museum, and the Austin Museum of Art.

Barry Stone was born in Lubbock, Texas, and earned an MFA in Photography from the University of Texas at Austin (2001) and founded the lens based artists collective, Lakes Were Rivers. His work is represented by Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery in New York and Art Palace Gallery in Houston. Stone lives in Austin, with his wife and two daughters and is an Assistant Professor and the Coordinator of the Department of Photography in the School of Art and Design at Texas State University-San Marcos.