Presence Owed

Rhys Angel Castillo, Thabile Makue & Alexander Kaye

Artists across sound, visuals, and poetry join together to create a series of short multimedia pieces. These short videos center around the honest expression of the emotions surrounding our communal growth and hardships as a global society throughout 2020 and 2021. 

Elements of aleatoricism (chance, randomness) are present in this specific collaborative process with results akin to ‘exquisite corpse’ artforms. This is meant to literally and metaphorically represent the chaotic, beautiful, tragic, and unexpected reality of our humanness.

This workshop project was created by Rhys Angel Castillo, Thabile Makue & Alexander Kaye in response to NOW WHAT open call written by Anise S. Hines Theus, Daleen Saah, Jasmine Lin, and Joal Stein.

Thabile Makue (they/them) is a healer, writer, teacher, and student of miracles. They are trained as an African Traditional Healer and teacher. Their book ‘mamaseko’ was published in 2020 by the African Poetry Book Fund at the University of Nebraska. Their work has also been included in multiple journals as well as “20.35 Africa: An Anthology of Contemporary Poetry”, and “New Daughters of Africa: An International Anthology of Writing by Women of African Descent”.

Rhys Angel Castillo (they/them) The goal; manifest imagination. Digital mediums can closely bridge the gap between mental visions and real world. I use this medium to create work that explores concepts focused on religion, mystic, ancient, and  non traditional beliefs, and how said beliefs characterize duality and  internal struggle. Creation as a form of self expression can be challenging and all together freeing. Let us be unbound by obstacles in order that we may see ourselves as divine beings.

Alexander Kaye (he/they) is an artist born near Detroit Michigan and currently residing in Los Angeles California. His practice began in writing and producing music and has since expanded into sound and visual art. He creates experimental music with modular synthesis, field recordings, audio manipulation, chance/aleatoric techniques, and traditional instrumentation. Often finding creative guidance through chance and random operations, he embraces unknown variables as part of the process that influences all of his work and life.