INNER FORM
"Chavez is an intrepid explorer who seeks the edges of our limitations and gracefully shares her discoveries. We are willing participants in her odyssey of revelation." - Pan and the Dream
Inner Form (2017)
Performance and Installation
Commissioned by Isabella Rossellini
Presented at Mama Farm, Brookhaven Hamlet, New York
Timed to coincide with the winter solstice, Inner Form is an immersive meditation on the dialogue between Nature’s luminosity, life cycles, and human consciousness. Conceived as both a performance and ephemeral installation, the work took place at Mama Farm in Brookhaven Hamlet, New York, and was commissioned by Isabella Rossellini. This ritual work created a contemplative space where the inner architecture of consciousness met the elemental intelligence of nature, converging through light, motion, and ceremonial gesture.
"Kaleidoscopic." - Forbes
As the sun dipped below the horizon, Chavez presented a live performance accompanied by sacred drumming from members of the Shinnecock Nation. The work explored the elemental interplay of light, time, space, and movement, offering a meditation on how the act of becoming visible—of exposing one’s being—can reveal deeper inner truths. In a continuous series of pirouettes, Chavez enacted a search for her own micro-planetary axis. With each spin, she emitted stroboscopic bursts of light, while the rhythmic drumming entrained the audience’s brainwaves, drawing them into a heightened state of sensory and spiritual awareness.
The performance unfolded as a living photograph. Light and shadow captured fleeting impressions of her moving body, fragmenting it into a shifting constellation of forms. These visual echoes—at once physical and ephemeral—cycled through states of stasis and transformation, reminiscent of Eadweard Muybridge’s early photographic studies of human locomotion. Yet this was not simply a display of motion; it was an invitation into the manifested moment of perceptual crystallization.
In that suspended present, the flowing stream of awareness was made tangible. The audience encountered the precise instant when consciousness condenses into vision—when pure sensation gives rise to form. The outcome of the performance was not a fixed image, but a state of clarity: an embodied realization of the union between body, light, and perception. This ephemeral ritual left behind no artifact, only a deepened understanding of the luminous, ever-becoming nature of being itself.
Details
Inner Form, 2017
Performance and sculptural installation
A commission by Isabella Rossellini
Mama Farm, Brookhaven Hamlet, New York
Credits
Artistic director and performer: Lia Chavez
Drummer: Weyhan Smith of The Shinnecock Nation
Curator and Presenter: Isabella Rossellini
Producer: Nur El Shami
Costuming: Christian Dior
Stylist: Richard Ives
Documentation: Ioulex, Ira Lippke, and Alexis Silver
The exhibition featured a series of sculptural works composed by Chavez that served as studies on the interplay of cosmic light with the earthly. One such sculpture—composed of 108 chicken eggs ranging in hue from light to dark and in size from large to small—was meticulously collected from the heirloom chickens at Mama Farm between the summer and winter solstices and installed in descending order from an oak tree at the precise angle of the Earth’s axial tilt. The number 108, a sacred cosmological constant and the number of beads traditionally used in meditation malas, mirrored the cycle by which hens reach their egg-laying zenith at the summer solstice and cease altogether during the winter solstice. This work became a meditation on fertility, cyclical transformation, and the hidden geometries that structure life across scales.
As in all her work, Chavez approached Inner Form as a ceremonial act—an ephemeral rite in which audience and environment became co-participants in a shared field of presence and perception.