BROOKLYN, NY.- Ecstatic song, meditation, blending, Fever Songs is an evocation for peace and harmony. Artists Meg Hitchcock and John Morton seek order in chaos, creating unity through shared expressions of faith freed from the constraints of organized religion.

John Morton, Composer, Installation
Fever Songs is an 10-Channel interactive public sound installation project that brings together the vocal traditions of many religions, creating an active sonic experience that explores spiritual commonality & seeks to break down religious divisions. The work is a commingling of ritual and scriptural vocalization, recorded live whenever possible, woven together & sonically altered by ever-changing computer processing and sensor-proximity location. The installation is devoid of doctrine - rather, a bringing together of the commonality of the human ecstatic experience.

Material for Fever Songs has been gathered and recorded from vocalists/practitioners in Northeast/Mid-Atlantic region. John has been recording specific vocalists (unaccompanied) in the following religious communities: Tibetan Buddhist, Haitian, Abenaki, Christian, Hindu, Islamic, & Jewish, and incorporates location recordings gathered by other musicologists.

Fever Songs is a fiscally-sponsored project of NY Foundation for the Arts.

For the last 10 years, John Morton has been creating large-scale installations that involve direct public interactivity and are based on a particular time and place. Sound Bridge, commissioned by the Hudson River Museum is permanently installed on a pedestrian bridge over the Saw Mill River in downtown Yonkers. Four sensors are placed along the railing of the bridge, and visitors are invited to activate and manipulate the sounds (made of field recordings of industrial activities, environmental sounds, and oral histories from Yonkers) and to respond to other visitors and to the environment. Sonic Hotel: Lost and Found Sounds of the Adirondacks was recently on view at the Adirondack Museum. In 2014, Usonia, created in collaboration with media students from the Jacob Burns Media Lab was part of the sound festival "Garden of Sonic Delights" at Caramoor and he also collaborated on an interactive video and sound installation for the Hudson River Museum in February (Mixed Messages - part of the exhibition "The Art ofVideo Games"). In 2017, he exhibited a new interactive work, Backchannel, at ODETTA Gallery in Brooklyn.

Fever Songs has been installed at ODETTA Gallery from April 20 - May 20, 2018 and has received funding from NYSCA and the Foundation for Contemporary Art.

PERFORMANCE: ODETTA will bring John Morton and bassist, Scott Colley together in a concert on Saturday, May 12, at 4:00 pm at ODETTA as part of Creative Tech Week. John Morton (electronics) and Scott Colley (acoustic bass) present The Orangetown Resolution, a collaborative exploration of defined and erratic improvisation. Each performer will use data received from ping sensors attached to the fingerboard of the bass to control, expand, abandon, follow, and channel intentions and sonic output.

Meg Hitchcock, Collage, Works on Paper
Meg Hitchcock works with sacred texts, cutting letters and combining them to create intricate designs. Her work addresses the limitations of language and interpretation, and questions the exclusivity of fundamentalist belief systems. Letters are cut from a Bible and rearranged into a passage from the Koran, letters from the Koran are transformed into verses from the Torah, and so on. By deconstructing and recombining the holy books of diverse religions, she undermines their authority and animates the common thread that weaves through all scripture.

As a former evangelical Christian, Hitchcock is interested in the psychology of authority, surrender, and transcendence. The repetition of cutting and placing letters simulates the liturgical sacraments of the Church, and alludes to the recitations of Eastern religions. The labor-intensive aspect of her work is a meditation practice as well as an exploration of the various forms of devotion. Hitchcock’s work is a celebration of the diverse experiences of spirituality, as well as an acknowledgment of the desire for connection with something larger than oneself. By blurring the boundaries between religions, she suggests that the holy word of God may be nothing more than a sublime expression of our shared humanity.

Meg Hitchcock is an artist living and working in the Hudson Valley, New York. She received her BFA in painting from the San Francisco Art Institute, and studied classical painting in Florence, Italy. Her work with sacred texts is a culmination of her lifelong interest in religion, literature, and psychology. Hitchcock's work has been shown in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, London, and Berlin, and reviewed in Art in America, ArtCritical, The Boston Globe, The New Criterion, Huffington Post, Hyperallergic, and The Daily Beast.