The Durango Arts Center (DAC) is continually seeking to amplify creative opportunities for our community through innovative programming that is at once inspiring and entirely unique.

'This World Made Itself' is a multimedia live performance combining projected animation and the artist’s own shadow silhouette, creating a phenomenal theatrical spectacle. The piece is a visually and musically rich journey through the history of the earth, from the universe’s epic beginnings to the complex world of humanity. Notable past performance sites of This World Made Itself include the Museum of Modern Art (New York, NY), Lincoln Center (New York, NY), Exploratorium (San Francisco, CA), Walker Art Museum (Minneapolis, MN), Wexner Center for the Arts (Columbus, OH), Institute for Contemporary Art (Boston, MA), and the Sundance Film Festival (Park City, UT) among several others.

'Myth and Infrastructure' is a live performance with projected animation. The artist’s shadow is constantly present in this piece from beginning to end – sometimes in semi close-up and sometimes as a full figure – as the world around her shifts and transforms. Her shadow becomes an integral part of her own fantastical animation worlds, as she traverses oceanscapes, cityscapes, and domestic spaces to conjure dreamlike scenes with light and shadow.

ABOUT THE ARTIST : MIWA MATREYEK—www.semihemisphere.com

Miwa Matreyek is an animator, director, designer and performer based in Los Angeles, CA. She has been an internationally touring independent artist since 2010. Miwa creates live, staged performances where she interacts with her animations as a shadow silhouette, at the cross section of cinematic and theatrical, fantastical and tangible, illusionistic and physical. Her work exists in a dreamlike visual space that makes invisible worlds visible, often weaving surreal and poetic narratives of conflict between man and nature.