Ground Floor Performance Program

weave, unweave, ravel, thread, expanse, a sound performance combining weaving, live mixing, looping, voice and unconventional instruments. Grace Papineau-Couture manipulates voice and non-musical sounds to conjure a shared sonic experience that explores the ephemerality of analog audio and the temporality of sound and place.

Carissa Lee Pinckney presents a sonic performance highlighting the artist’s ancestral ties to America.

ABOUT THE ARTSTS:

Grace Papineau-Couture is a Canadian artist from Edmonton, Alberta, currently based in Chicago, Illinois. Working across sound, installation, and performance, Grace pulls at the threads of folk horror – a genre that explores tensions between modern life and
archaic fears – uniquely merging the physicality and ephemerality of analog audio and folk storytelling to explore modern ritual and superstition. With a material interest in using sound as raw material, Grace dismantles historic rituals and superstitions through
the creation of field recordings, sampling and handmade uncanny instruments.

An artist and performer, Grace has exhibited their work across Canada and the US, most recently in Hyde Park Art Center’s “Ground Floor” exhibition. She has also shown work in the show “Nascency” at dc3 arts in Alberta, Waveforms Festival at High Concept Labs, the Purple Window Gallery and Comfort Station in Chicago. Grace performs live and records experimental music and sound art under the name Mountain Laurel.

Grace has an interdisciplinary artistic background, trained across the visual and performing arts. They hold a Bachelor of Fine arts in experimental media and printmaking from the University of Alberta and a Master of Fine Arts in interdisciplinary studio practice from Columbia College Chicago.

Carissa Lee Pinckney is a Chicago- and Los Angeles-based performance, sound, and theatrical artist. She earned her BFA in Theater from NYU and MFA in Performance from SAIC. Is a founding member of Suspended Culture art collective, which has performed at the bell hooks symposium and received the DCASE Performing Arts Grant. She has exhibited in Los Angeles, Chicago, and Quebec City, with works featured at Elastic Arts, Ohio University, and Links Hall.

She was a 2024 High Concept Labs Artist in Residence and a 2023 Elastic Arts Dark Matter Resident. She has curated exhibitions like All About Love and produced performances such as Alice is Stuck in Los Angeles.

Currently a High Concept Labs Fellow and contracted producer at MCA Chicago, she is developing Thrival, an improvisational theatrical work exploring sonic technologies that help people thrive. Her writing has appeared in Mental Realness Magazine, and on Gray Area Stories podcast.

The content of her work explores Blackness, intergenerational trauma, family archives, and mental health. She integrates recordings, writing, and Black Southern culture to materialize grief, isolation, and hope.

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

Hyde Park Art Center, 5020 South Cornell Avenue, Chicago, United States