Emma Lang - Silk Oil

A performance-installation by studio lang (Allison Lang & Emma Lang)

Upcoming: Silk Oil, Left of PuSh Festival, Vancouver (CA). January-February 2027.
Past: Silk Oil (in-progress sharing), Odd Merridian Arts, Vancouver (CA), 07. April, 2026

| There is a rupture and a resistance to permanency. Later, a relinquished sspeech. A ssimple whir-hum in its place. But first, there is the sstumbling and the phonetics of falling. The doling out of chaos. The percussion of holz on holz all orchestrated by the sslip-sstream-man: formal, urgent, calamitous. Sssilk Oil does not walk but glidess without time /

This work was conceptualized and researched while in residence at Morrow, Odd Merridian Arts (Vancouver, CA). Thank you to Odd Merridian Arts for the generous support through funds and space during our Impromptu Residency.

Silk-Oil is a recipient of a Canada Council for the Arts grant for Research and Creation. We would like to acknowledge the support of Canada Council for the Arts for making this work possible.

Silk-Oil (2026) is a performance-installation in the round that blends sound and contemporary movement to engage audience in a sensorial narrative landscape. The surreal landscape starts from the image of a floating structure at sea surrounded by bright mist. In a subtle abstraction of this image, scaffolding is dressed in materials that render the object as performer engaged sculptural-installation. Recalling an unstable timeline and a past-present embodiment, droning sound and movement resonate in tandem, while a contemporary folk tale, built upon a tripartite being of spirit, creature and human fragments is realized. In their stable presence, audience remains human, maintaining the third fragmentary piece, while the two performers differentiate into spirit and creature states. Language is erred and abstracted to functional affect-producing precision, while sound design of layered drone and live textures heighten tension and release. In reference to the practice of time-shifting and the image-rich body, choreographed movement draws on butoh and contemporary training which asks abandonment of a certain quality of willfulness to convey an uninhibited spirit fragment.

Exhausting patterns of repetition and shifting through imaginitives, Silk-Oil searches unified moments between audience, performer and other, elaborating on the artist duo's ongoing desire to declaw the concrete.