Composer David Lang’s piece, When I’m Alone, is performed alongside Amy Podmore’s sculptural wall installation, Audience. Embracing nuance and ambiguity, the two pieces together reflect the harmonies and balances, as well as the contradictions and paradoxes, of what it means to be both an individual and a citizen of this world. When I’m Alone will be performed by the Williams College Chamber Choir, under the direction of Anna Lenti.

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About the Exhibition:
Amy Podmore is propelled by an interest in surrealist strategies of transformation and the line between stillness and motion in sculpture.

In Audience, she offers enigmatic plaster casts of found wicker baskets and cornucopias. What we see as the exterior is actually the interior of these baskets, unfolding a vulnerable underbelly in the act of reversal. Podmore embeds motorized glass eyeballs into the woven warp and weft of the basket surfaces, still visible in the plaster translation. Defamiliarized, the molded baskets and their ranging, expressive forms adopt an almost anthropomorphic quality. As their eyes sleepily fall shut and whip open, the museum visitor becomes the one being uncannily watched.

About the Artists:
David Lang is one of the most highly esteemed and performed American composers writing today. His works have been performed around the world in most of the great concert halls. Lang’s the little match girl passion, commissioned by Carnegie Hall and premiered by Paul Hillier and Theatre of Voices, was recently listed by The Guardian as “one of the top 25 works of classical music written in the 21st century.” It won the Pulitzer Prize in 2008, and the recording received a Grammy Award in 2010. simple song #3, written as part of his score for Paolo Sorrentino’s acclaimed film YOUTH, received many award nominations in 2016, including the Academy Award and Golden Globe. His opera prisoner of the state (with libretto by Lang) was co-commissioned by the New York Philharmonic, Rotterdam’s de Doelen Concert Hall, London’s Barbican Centre, Barcelona’s l’Auditori, Bochumer Symphony Orchestra, and Bruges’ Concertgebouw, and premiered in June 2019 in New York (conducted by Jaap van Zweden). prisoner of the state received its UK premiere in January 2020 with the BBC Symphony (conducted by Ilan Volkov) and its EU premiere in May 2023 with the Bochumer Symphoniker (conducted by Steven Sloane). Lang is a Professor of Music Composition at the Yale School of Music. He is co-founder and co-artistic director of New York’s legendary music collective Bang on a Can. His music is published by Red Poppy Music and G. Ricordi & Co., New York (ASCAP) and is distributed worldwide by the Universal Music Publishing Group.

Amy Podmore lives and works in Williamstown, Massachusetts where she is currently the J. Kirk T. Varnedoe named professor of art at Williams College. She received her MFA from the University of California, Davis, and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Previous exhibition venues include the Tang Teaching Museum, Williams College Museum of Art, Bell Gallery (Brown University, Providence, RI), Allston Skirt Gallery (Boston, MA), Rose Art Museum (Brandeis University, Waltham, MA), deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum (Lincoln, MA), and the ICA (Portland, ME).

Amy Podmore: Audience, as installed at MASS MoCA on August 3, 2024. Photo: Jon Verney.