The 13th Chair

Ruffin Gallery at the UVA Department of Art presents The Thirteenth Chair, a multimedia installation and live performances by Maria Villanueva (Assistant Professor, General Faculty, Digital Art) and Sean Lopez, with choreography by Rori Smith.

https://art.as.virginia.edu/thirteenth-chair-multimedia-experience

The Thirteenth Chair explores transformation through a contemporary reenactment of the Last Supper, using this pivotal moment as a mirror for our own time of necessary change. Like the apostles gathered around that table, we find ourselves at a threshold confronting an uncertain future that demands we let go of what we have known.

Through performance, video, installation, and abstract movement, this multimedia experience examines how we carry our cultural histories and personal mythologies forward into an unknown phase of existence. The performers, moving as geometric forms that reshape and reconfigure, embody the tension between holding on and letting go between the weight of what we’ve accumulated and the necessity of transformation.

We interrogate the decisions we have made, the objects and artifacts we have given meaning, and the belief systems that have sustained us. As a generation standing at our own last supper, we prepare to release our grip on relevance while claiming the strength and responsiveness of minds that have witnessed profound change.

The thirteenth chair remains empty perhaps for the audience, perhaps for the betrayer among us. Who or what sits in that chair? The world that abandons us? The systems that fail us? Ourselves, complicit in our own undoing? This experimental work asks not just what we must become, but what we must reckon with in the process of becoming.

Photography by Kori Price

Video documentation of performance. Carina V. and Meg K.

Sean Lopez is an intermedia artist and educator at George Mason University exploring consciousness and profanation through performance, projection mapping, and installation. Combining poetry, theater, folklore, and digital media, he examines humanity’s paradoxical relationship with imagination—craving creative freedom while fearing its power. He is a PhD candidate researching intermedial studies at the University of Maine, and holds a MFA from the University of North Texas.

Rori Smith is a dancer and researcher of bodily experience based in midcoast Maine. Her work intersects environmental performance art, ecosomatic movement practices and phenomenology. She holds an MFA in Dance from Temple University and is currently a doctoral candidate in Art & Philosophy at the University of Maine, an educator at the Center for Maine Contemporary Art, Associate Director of the somatic arts nonprofit Watermark Arts, and a member of the Continuum Teachers Association. Rori is co-author, with Elaine Colandrea, of The Elemental Body: A Movement Guide to Kinship with Ourselves and the Natural World.

Peformers & collaborators: Rory Adams, Bree Bozeman, Spirit Chavis, Sophie Chung, Shane Everhart, Carson Harter, Asha Hussain, Annie Kang, Anika Kashyap, Mysha Mosharaf, TS Richter, Isaac Thorne, and Raisa Mumtaheena.