SUMMER 2026
HALF WINGED
Matthew Ritchie + Shara Nova
May 16 – August 15, 2026
RECEPTION: Saturday, May 16, 5-8pm
Half Winged is an immersive musical and visual installation built around a single, devastating question, Are we truly free?
Created by longtime collaborators, composer Shara Nova and visual artist Matthew Ritchie, Half Winged is a choral cantata — part song cycle, part ritual, part elegy — that maps humanity’s oldest pattern: the drive to build something new, something bigger, something more beautiful, only to question it, destroy it and begin again.
This ambitious yet accessible work is anchored in a magnificent 70 minute recursive musical score recorded using a spatialized Atmos sound system and featuring an extraordinary ensemble of singers, AI programs, live and recorded instruments.
Addressing pressing contemporary issues of choice and the impact of technology by drawing on and remixing fragments of texts ranging from the Enuma Elish to Paradise Lost, W.E.B. Du Bois’ Princess Steel, Walter Benjamin’s Angel of History, and Paul Klee’s Pedagogical Sketchbook; Half Winged gives this pattern a structure through a cast of characters in a feature-length multi-screen AI-generated video, named after the programs used in Large Language Models. The Discriminator, entropy’s angel forever facing backward, ; the Generator, the wind of change pressing blindly forward; the Transformer, the Witness, the Gardener, the Weaver, and finally the Child — a character voiced entirely by artificial intelligence — who returns, across every act, to the same unanswered question:
Are we truly free?
This project was generously supported by New Music USA and the Knight Foundation.
Steel Work of Mild Hands brings together recent works by Alberte Tranberg and Adam Shirley, two artists whose practices engage deeply with metal as a site of labor, time, and material decision-making. Shown within the context of the SNAG (Society of North American Goldsmiths) Conference 2026 in Detroit and hosted by Wasserman Projects, the exhibition connects individual studio practices to broader conversations about making, effort, and value in contemporary metal and jewelry. Rather than approaching metal as a neutral medium, both artists foreground labor as an active and visible component of the work. Processes such as cutting, bending, joining, and repeating are not hidden but allowed to remain present, shaping both form and meaning. In this sense, labor is not only a means to an end, but a way of thinking through material.
Presented together, the works create a dialogue around different approaches to metalwork—ranging from precision and control to repetition, accumulation, and wear. The exhibition proposes labor as a shared ground, while allowing distinct positions to emerge through material choices, scale, and process.
Steel Work of Mild Hands is on view from May 16 – June 13, 2026