Sky Creature with Tony Orrico

The Cleveland Museum of Art welcomes you to Transformer Station for a two-hour immersive, multimedia collaboration between art-rock band Sky Creature and dancer / graphic artist Tony Orrico.

New York City–based duo Sky Creature crosses contemporary classical music with ambient rock. Orrico is a kinetic visual artist who creates life-size graphite works using his entire body. In this high-energy performance, the music progresses from sound bath to ecstatic electronic raga, while Orrico’s canvas thickens with lines. The collaboration debuted at PS1 in Iowa City and has since been performed at the Speed Art Museum in Louisville and the Knoxville Museum of Art.

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 the Forms, a postpunk duo, sharing the stage with artists ranging from the National to St. Vincent to Hum. A former opera singer, Connery has been featured on Radiolab, New Sounds radio, and “Live from the Kennedy Center.” In the summer of 2022, Sky Creature released a double EP, Bear Mountain / Childworld, and toured nationally to 42 cities, concluding with a show at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas. The duo is currently finishing its first LP, which received production support from Steve Albini. 

Visual and performing artist 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 the collections at the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, DC, and the Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo (MUAC) in Mexico City, and he has presented at the Centre Pompidou-Metz in France, the New Museum in New York City, and PopTech 2011: The World Rebalancing, which took place in Camden, Maine. Orrico is currently assistant professor of dance and sculpture/intermedia at the University of Iowa.

More information about Sky Creature can be found on the band's website.