Reclaimed Timber

Reclaimed Timber reimagines Michael Gordon’s percussion sextet Timber as an immersive multimedia performance experience. Played entirely on just six slats of amplified wood, past shows have featured “instruments” directly from vacant homes in Baltimore, from Seattle-based BLOCK Project’s modular home fabrication process, from a deconstructed historic home through a collaboration with Chicago-based ReBuilding Exchange, from a past forest fire in the Coconino National Forest through a collaboration with Flagstaff-based visual artist Shawn Skabelund, and even from pieces of a decommissioned wine barrel in the Walla Walla region. Each performance of Reclaimed Timber becomes a unique and profound examination of the consequences that stem from each community’s policies around housing, development, and environmental stewardship.

Reclaimed Timber includes a reactive lighting installation that was designed and built by Baltimore-based visual artists Jenn Figg and Matthew McCormack. This lighting installation comprises dozens of paper lantern “houses” depicting locations where Reclaimed Timber has been performed previously, including Baltimore row homes, rail bridges over the Chicago river, schematics of modular houses built by the BLOCK project in Seattle, and local flora of Arizona currently under threat from climate change. These lanterns are illuminated by more than 5000 LEDs directly activated by contact microphones on each slat of wood.