American Gurl
Live Performances by Kilo Kish, Ray Brady, Morgan Amirah Burns & Urban Word NYC
Friday, October 14, 2022 | 11:00pm - 12:00am
A live performance which expands on the ideas in American Gurl through movement and spoken word. The evening will feature a 3-part piece by Kilo Kish and music producer and composer, Ray Brady, and a dance collaboration with Morgan Amirah Burns (currently a grant recipient of the Merce Cunningham Trust). The evening will start with spoken word performances by girls from Urban Word NYC. Urban Word champions, centers, elevates young marginalized voices as leaders at the intersection of the literary arts and civic engagement. The event has been curated by Zehra Ahmed + Kilo Kish.
Every night in October, multi-hyphenate artist and performer Kilo Kish brings a new kind of Americana to the billboards of Times Square. Kish’s Midnight Moment American Gurl fuses pop culture, camp, and fantasy into a video work that centers the artist within conventional notions of the American Dream.
Assembled through the artist’s personal collection of vintage travel postcards, Kish collages animated vignettes with backdrops emblematic of American tourist stops, ranging from farmhouses and iconic bridges to resorts and airways. Central to each composition is the artist herself, resulting in a series of moving selfies that collapse space and time — complete with sumptuous costume changes, props ranging from ice cream cones to feathered fans, and wish-you-were-here vibes from her fictional, faraway places.
“With these pieces, I am interested in exploring how we can reimagine the American dream to include women of color along with our hopes and desires. These moving images represent the intersection of our past and present, exploring new ways of dreaming through their fusion.”
— Kilo Kish
American Gurl creates a visual bridge from the past to create expansive musings on the future, wielding the ever-persuasive powers of art and consumerism in the center of Times Square.
Midnight Moment is the world’s largest, longest-running digital art exhibition, synchronized on over 90 electronic billboards throughout Times Square nightly from 11:57pm to midnight. This year, Times Square Arts is celebrating the ten year anniversary of the Midnight Moment series with a roster of all women and femme-expansive artists until April 2023.
American Gurl was created in collaboration with Matt Cowen, Ashley Furnival, and Rachel Graves.
ABOUT KILO KISH
Kish Robinson (Kilo Kish) is an interdisciplinary artist and performer working in music, film, installation, performance, and the written word. Musically, she has collaborated with Gorillaz, The Internet, Vince Staples, and Donald Glover, garnering attention since her debut in 2011. Her most extensive project is ‘Kilo Kish’, a solo music project exploring personal identity and socio-cultural expectations.
Kish works in a project-based format, diving into various genres and mediums to dissect her unsettled view of millennial life. Her work is characterized by existentialism, absurdity, and humor, explored through popular media formats like songs and music videos.
Her music has been featured in Vogue, W Magazine, The New York Times, Pitchfork, Dazed, The Guardian, Billboard, and Fader. Kish's videos have been screened at the Getty Center, The Hammer Museum, and the Museum of Image and Sound in Brazil. She's worked with countless brands in the fashion sphere, including Chanel, Rodarte, Levi's, Nike, and Adidas. She's created capsule collections and fashion pieces with Maison Kitsuné and X-Girl Japan. Kish exhibited performance and film works with two solo installations at HVW8 Art + Design Gallery in Los Angeles.
ABOUT WOMXN IN WINDOWS
Womxn in Windows is a platform for the perspectives of womxn on culture, identity and society. What started as an annual public exhibition of womxn-made art films in storefront windows is now on a mission to support intergenerational and cross-cultural dialogue. WxW has been regarded by the LA Times as ‘a video art show made for this moment’ and by LA Weekly as ‘an installation that challenges conventions of female representation’. Through the years WxW has shown the works of digital artists and filmmakers such as Ja’tovia Gary, Kilo Kish, Alima Lee, Christine Yuan, Yumna Al Arashi & Arshia Fatima Haq among many others. WxW was founded in 2019 by Zehra Ahmed.
Midnight Moment is made possible by the Times Square Advertising Coalition, ABC SuperSign, American Eagle, Branded Cities, Clear Channel, Disney Store, Express, Levi's, LG, Luxottica Group S.p.A., Morgan Stanley, Microsoft, New Tradition, Sensory Interactive, Sephora, Sherwood Equities, Show + Tell, Silvercast, Swatch, T-Mobile, and JCDecaux.
Major support of Times Square Arts is provided by Morgan Stanley. Additional program support is provided by the National Endowment for the Arts; the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Kathy Hochul and the New York State Legislature; and public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council. Additional support for Midnight Moment is provided by Meta Open Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Times Square Advertising Coalition.
Photos by Michael Hull.