Artist we love- Lily Ockwell

Introducing Lily Ockwell, the first performance artist to join the Art Cart NYC™ team! She and some of her fellow dancers will be collaborating with one of our visual artists and choreographing a piece to perform outside of the truck for our upcoming exhibition.

Raised in Los Angeles, CA, Lily recently graduated from Connecticut College with a BA in dance. She currently lives in Brooklyn, New York, and is a member of the Gibney Dance Company. 

Lily wowed us with a video recording of her senior honors thesis, entitled “Precariously in Translation.” The work documents her time spent living in Senegal, West Africa. There she began a study of the tension between traditional and contemporary life, as seen through dance. She filmed her endeavors to capture the rituals and daily routines through movement in both cultural facets of Senegal. When she returned to the United States, she put together a mixed media work comprising literature, music, dance, and symbolic objects, which she refers to as “analytical performance.”

Lily’s personal statement reads:

“This performance is a means to transfer the ideas of ritual from one culture to [another].  The process began as one of reflection of time in a foreign culture, but has ultimately lead to new ideas about our own cultural, and my personal, belief systems.  This study is just a beginning to delve into how these ideas can play out in movement. From my [experience], I have developed a scale to which I would like to place movement on a cultural spectrum.  It begins with habitual movement, and has the ability to develop into ritualistic movement, which finally can lead to performance. 

*Habitual-Ritual-Theatrical*

I hope to question the role of each of these in our regular lives and ultimately in making art.“

Check out these shots from her performance and visit this website to see one of her solos choreographed by Monica Bill Barnes, as well as other performances.

For more information about Lily, email info@artcartnyc.com