LIGHT BODY
“Lia Chavez’s Stunning Light Performance.” — Artnet News
Details
Light Body, 2016
Performance
A commission by Isabella Rossellini
Presented at Mama Farm in Brookhaven Hamlet, New York
Costuming by Mary Katrantzou
Credits
Artistic Director and Performer: Lia Chavez
Performers: Troy Ogilvie and Djassi daCosta Johnson
Producers: Beverly Allan and Nur El Shami
Costume Designer: Mary Katrantzou
Stylist: Richard Ives
Beauty: Virginia Linzee
Curatorial Consultant: Tali Wertheimer
Essayist: Andrea Codrington Lippke
Documentation: Ira Lippke
Presenter: Isabella Rossellini
Selected Press
Light Body (2016)
Performance, 0:45
Commissioned by Isabella Rossellini
Presented at Mama Farm, Brookhaven Hamlet, New York
Light Body is a durational optical performance in which the human form becomes a site of perceptual and spiritual transformation. Performed at dusk, luminous figures move through wooded landscape in choreographed procession, their illuminated gestures generating chromatic afterimages that linger in viewers' perceptual fields—images neither fully external nor subjective, but emergent within the act of seeing itself.
Drawing from contemplative walking practices and neuroaesthetic research into retinal phenomena, the work structures perception as a disciplined encounter with light.
Fireflies and cicadas enter as co-present participants, their intermittent luminosity and sonic rhythm extending the performance into distributed perceptual field between body, environment, and atmosphere.
“For Chavez, we are the universe and the universe is us. We are shot through with order and cosmic light.” – Image Journal
“A performance art spectacle of light and color.” –The New York Times
Preceded by a collective stillness led by Rossellini, the performance establishes conditions of attentional receptivity in which transformation occurs not as escape from embodiment but as intensified disclosure within it—where light, attention, and presence converge, rendering perception newly legible and orienting awareness toward transcendent horizon understood not as invention but as revelation.
Costuming by Mary Katrantzou translates spectral modulation into material form.
“Chavez views light as a type both of the divine substance and the lofting, penetrating faculty of the mind.” –Image Journal
