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
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Performed at winter solstice, Inner Form investigates how rotational motion and stroboscopic light render the body both visible and dissolved—a durational performance in which Chavez executes continuous pirouettes while emitting rhythmic light pulses, fragmenting bodily form into sequential after images.
"Kaleidoscopic." - Forbes
Winter solstice timing establishes cosmological condition: the longest night, solar nadir, threshold of return. Within this temporal structure, the work examines how sustained rotation—both literal (bodily) and metaphorical (celestial)—can render perceptible what ordinarily escapes awareness: the precise instant when sensation crystallizes into apprehension, when flux stabilizes into form, when consciousness recognizes its own organizing activity.
The performance leaves no artifact, only the memory of how attention, when focused upon continuous transformation, apprehends order within flux—what classical theology understands as the intelligible structure underlying apparent chaos, disclosed through disciplined observation.
Accompanied by sacred drumming from members of the Shinnecock Nation, the work operates at the threshold between stasis and motion, presence and dissolution. Each rotation generates a visual field reminiscent of Eadweard Muybridge's chronophotographic studies, yet where Muybridge fixed motion into analyzable sequence, Inner Form sustains motion as continuous perceptual flux—a living field in which form appears, dissolves, and reappears through the viewer's retinal persistence.
The performance proposes the spinning body as axis around which perception organizes itself. Light emitted in pulses creates discrete visual impressions that cohere into gestalt only through the viewer's own perceptual synthesis—positioning observation not as passive reception but as active construction of coherence from fragmented stimulus. This recalls Byzantine icon theory, where image discloses presence not through static representation but through participation—the viewer's sustained attention completing what the material form initiates.