Back in the day, Julia Kent was a striking Goth presence amid the cubicles of the Village Voice, spending her out-of-office hours playing cello with downtown rock band Rasputina and other singer-songwriters.
After going solo, the Vancouver-born, NYC-based cellist found her own groove, with compositions that are looped and layered, combining live performance with recorded cello tracks, found sounds, and electronics. Her first solo album, the intensely poignant Delay, was released in 2007; since then she has released five more albums, in addition to composing original work for theater, dance, and film productions and touring Europe and North America.
Kent will be performing in the Met’s European paintings galleries amid a rotation of works from the permanent collection entitled “Ecologies of Painting,” described as an “exploration of how artists shape cultural conceptions of the natural world.” This should be a good fit, as she began using field recordings in her second solo album, Green and Grey, “to explore the intersections between the human world and the natural world, the melding of the technological and the organic, the patterns and repetitions that exist in nature and are mirrored in human creations, and the complexity and fragility of our relationships with one another and with the world that surrounds us.”
The performance promises to be relevant and gorgeous, and also free with museum admission, which remains “pay what you wish” for New York State residents. Nice combo for an NYC spring evening. ❖
Julia Kent
The Met Fifth Avenue
Gallery 628, European Paintings
April 10 at 5:30 & 7 p.m.
Free with museum admission
