Blogger Bios
Tom Pearson is Co-Artistic Director of Third Rail Projects and works in a variety of media that includes contemporary dance, site-specific performance, film, visual art, and large-scale installations. Each work introduces its own movement and/or visual vocabulary, defined by the parameters of the subject, site, and performance environment. The work ranges from the surreal to the absurd. Through the lens of a contemporary movement vocabulary, unabashed theatricality, and striking dream-like images, Pearson creates dense, evocative worlds that illuminate the transient and transformational, using movement abstracted from and coupled with everyday action. Paired with this is a fierce percussive abandon, often complimented by meditative nuance. Likewise, Pearson uses art installation to achieve rich, multi-dimensional environments, and site-specific explorations seek to mine public spaces for hidden meaning and to engage unwary and unsuspecting passersby. Colliding mythic archetypes with modern urbanites, projects by Tom Pearson and his collaborators seek to interrupt the sleekness of the metropolitan flow to reconcile and reconfigure the relevance of art in the public sphere. Frequently, Pearson also draws from his Coharie/Creek/Cherokee heritage to create works that challenge the expectations of what it means to be contemporary, urban, and Indian.
Pearson's writings on dance have been published in Dance Magazine, Dance Spirit, Time Out New York Kids, and Uncoolkids.com.
To read more about Tom's commissions, residencies, and other artistic endeavors, please visit http://thirdrailprojects.com/tom.html to read his full bio.
Zach Morris believes that art should be fun. He also believes it should be well-crafted, engaging and have some meat to it. Most of all, Zach believes that art is a means to an end-a meditative discipline and an on-going investigation of the human condition utilizing a communicative system of images, juxtapositions and metaphors that resonate on a fundamental, intuitive level. As such, he is deeply interested in exploring themes and relationships that illuminate the broader patterns of human experience. He is fascinated with evoking archetypal images and placing them into highly personal or pedestrian contexts. By colliding the mythic with the mundane he has begun to understand how these dream-like images can inform, shape and elucidate our day-to-day existence.
Zach hopes to effect positive change by creating projects that allow both the artist and audience to sidestep our preconceived notions about our reality and ourselves, and allow us access to more elusive but equally potent ways of understanding. Some people have written about his work and said it is "wickedly funny", "visually stunning" and "hauntingly melancholy." Other people have said, "there is no escaping the feeling that you have been doing drugs for the past hour. Good drugs."
Zach is a director, choreographer, author, visual artist, and filmmaker. His work has been seen in London, at several theaters around the US and at numerous venues in New York City including: the South Street Seaport as part of the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council's SiteLines Series, Dance Theater Workshop, Dance New Amsterdam, University Settlement/The New York Fringe Festival, Dixon Place, the Williamsburg Art Nexus, and The Merce Cunningham Studio. He has received the Henry Boettcher Award for Excellence in Directing, the NYC Fringe Fest Award for Excellence in Choreography, and has been granted residencies or commissions from La Mama, LMCC, the Swarthmore Project, The Great Neck House, Epiphany Theatre Company, Dance Theater Workshop's Outer/Space program at Topaz Arts, and others.
Zach is Co-Artistic Director of Third Rail Projects and has also served as the Co-Creator and Co-Director of the Westbeth New Works Program; the National and International Programs Associate at Dance Theater Workshop; the Bartender at a number of questionable establishments; and most recently, as the Dance Coordinator at LEVELS, a teen-center based in Long Island. Zach has a B.F.A. in Directing from Carnegie Mellon University.
