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).
“I first conceived of this collaboration as a way to soundtrack Orrico’s performance,” says vocalist Majel Connery. “Tony’s a former dancer with Trisha Brown, so his endurance is otherworldly, and his performances have an electric, bodily intensity. Sky is a very embodied band, and we’re always looking for ways to push our physical and spiritual limits. So we created this epic, hours-long piece of music to push ourselves and Tony artistically, and to give audiences a new way to enter Tony’s work through the medium of sound.”
Matt Walsh, Sky Creature’s baritone guitarist adds: “Tony has to face a wall, so the audience is missing out on a big part of his performance. So the first thing we did was to add a camera mounted over his head that projects his face larger than life onto the ceiling.”
Fall 2024, the piece debuts in a new 4-hour version that includes a new sonic component: contact mics that amplify Tony’s breathing and the sound of graphite on paper. Says Majel, “The piece now 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.”
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