Thesis Exhibition: April 10-13 

Reception: April 12, 6-8 pm

Let Us Build a City, 2024, steel, conduction speakers, amplifier. 96" x 96".

Let Us Build a City (detail), 2024, steel and conduction speaker. 

Artist Statement  

"Concrete utopias can also be daydream-like, but they are the hopes of a collective, an emergent group, or even the solitary oddball who is the one who dreams for many." — José Esteban Muñoz

The night club has displaced the church as a place to build community and transport the body. Hypnotic music, reverberating structures, ritualized consumption, and a communion of like-minded individuals all conspire to displace us from the ordinary and align us with the metaphysical. "Let Us Build a City" is an immersive exploration of sound, light, and sculpture that culminates my research into nightclub culture, queer futurity, and sacred spaces, grounded by my experience as a patron and employee of gay nightclubs. Equal parts architectural and acoustical, "Let Us Build a City" generates rhythms through drum machines, samplers, and sequencers using both found and synthesized sound integrated into a system of conduits and channels that flow through scaffolded structures. Tensions arise as the body moves through these structures: exaltation, contemplation, rest, exertion, anxiety, serenity. It is a network of sensations that blurs the line between dance music and liturgical atmosphere, a city of the future built as a refuge from the crush of urbanism. 

More information about Daniel Cappello at @interwaramerica