Sky Creature + Tony Orrico
art-rock band Sky creature + graphic artist tony orrico in an immersive multimedia collaboration
Tony Orrico is a kinetic visual artist who creates life-size graphite works using his entire body. Sky Creature crosses contemporary Classical music with ambient rock. In this high-energy collaboration, music fuels the athleticism of Orrico’s embodied practice, creating a dialogue between sight and sound that intensifies over time.
Sky + Tony have appeared at PS1 in Iowa City, Speed Art Museum (Louisville, KY), the Knoxville Museum of Art (Knoxville TN), The Exploratorium (San Francisco), and BAMPFA (Berkeley).
“We conceived of this as a collaboration to soundtrack Tony’s performance,” says Matt Walsh, of Sky Creature. “He’s a former dancer and his endurance is otherworldly and ecstatic. Sky is also a very embodied band, and we like pushing our physical limits. So we made an epic piece of music to match the intensity of Tony’s work and give audiences a new way to get inside what he’s doing — sonically.”
Majel Connery adds: “Tony faces a wall, so the audience is missing out on a big part of his internal performance. One of the first things we did was mount a camera over his head to project his face. Now the audience gets to see his expressions EXTRA large. The piece culminates in this glorious Götterdämmerug of a climax where we’re all exhausted, I’m losing my voice, Tony’s covered in graphite, and Matt looks like he just ran a marathon. The final 30 minutes is worth the wait.”
By Mike Gustafson
Bios:
Sky Creature is vocalist Majel Connery and baritone guitarist Matt Walsh. Occupying a space between art music and punk rock, the band's sound elicits comparisons with artists from Kate Bush to Suicide. Walsh toured for over a decade as one half of post-punk duo The Forms, sharing stages with The National, St. Vincent, Nick Cave, and Hum. Connery’s solo music has been featured on Radiolab, New Sounds radio, and Live from the Kennedy Center. In 2022, Sky Creature toured nationally to 42 cities, concluding with a show for 4,000 at Crystal Bridges Museum. They are currently recording their first full-length album with Steve Albini. skycreature.nyc
Visual and performing artist Tony Orrico often uses his entire body to produce life-size graphic art on the walls and floors of major museums and performance spaces around the world. His visual work is in collection at The National Academy of Sciences (Washington DC) and Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporáneo (MUAC, Mexico City) and he has presented at Centre Pompidou-Metz, New Museum, and Poptech 2011: The World Rebalancing. Orrico is currently Assistant Professor of Dance and Sculpture/Intermedia at the University of Iowa. tonyorrico.com