From The Depths
Rochester Fringe Festival @ Memorial Art Gallery
Friday 18th-Sunday 20th September
SUNY Geneseo and its collaborators are bringing their art-meets-science events focused around artist Billie Lynn’s kinetic sculpture, a 65-foot inflatable replica of a sperm whale, created to spark environmental conversations and help us consider the role of art in ecological awareness. Planned events include a cello performance from inside the whale; site-specific dance; and curated opportunities for attendees to enter the whale. Combining live performance and curated exhibition, this event will allow attendees to learn about whale acoustics and leave both transformed by a range of art disciplines and enriched by scientific knowledge.
Lynn’s sculpture will be on view from 3pm-9pm with a performance each day at 7pm
Performance Program
- 7pm: Site-specific Dance Performance, choreographed by Allison Thomashefski ’11, in collaboration with dancers
- 7.15pm: Literary readings
- 7.30pm: From the Depths cello performance by Esther Rogers Baker
- 8.00pm: Ecopoem Film Screenings, featuring Willa Carroll and Jonathan Everitt
- 8.25pm: Dance performance, from inside the whale; improvisation by Allison Thomashefski, in collaboration with Esther Rogers Baker and Geneseo students: Willow Bertram, Maggie Brchnel, Jasmine Buffone, Ace Bodkin, Thatcher Kaye, Mykayla McCarthy, Tavoris Parilla-Rozier. *Special thanks to Reilly Spitzfaden
All movement was created through an exploration of each dancer’s reaction to engaging with this unique site, its meanings, its shape, its movements, and its energy.
Dancers include current Geneseo students, alumni and guests:
Hailey Adams ’29
LauRen Nicole Alaimo ’11
Natalia Biehl-narvaez, ’26
Casey Dapshi ’27
Aviva Daniel ’27
Kaitlyn Eck ’24
Madeline Dembowski, UB MFA Dance ’27
Eduardo Imbert ’27
Sydney Mahaney ’29
Cadence Panol ’26
Violet Rand ’27
Kayla Shaw ’27
Sarah Starr ’27
Allison Thomashefski ’11
Kelsey Wegman, UB BFA Dance ’22
Addison Wendt ’29
Artist Statement: Billie Grace Lynn, Have Whale Will Travel
This has always been the work of art: to inspire the senses — to make the body feel — without necessarily direct experience, through signs, colors, sounds, movement, and so on. At its highest, the experience and the making of art are identical.
Accordingly, my work is usually interactive and kinetic in nature. I strive to make pieces in which the viewer interface is both the form and function of the piece. I want people to remember themselves, in much the same way that babies discover their fingers. When my work is successful, the piece is completed by the viewer-participant and she/he continues her/his journey more aware and delighted in being a body.
Sperm Whale
The sperm whale is the inspiration for artist Billie Lynn’s 65-foot inflatable sculpture. The sculpture may be light, but a sperm whale this size weighs more than 60 tons, about half the combined weight of the SUNY Geneseo graduating class of 2026.
Where does the name come from? While hunting, whalers found gallons of a waxy substance in the whale’s heads, known as spermaceti. But spermaceti has nothing to do with reproduction; this oil sac helps sperm whales focus sound. Sperm whales communicate and locate food with clicks, making a characteristic call that can be heard for hundreds of miles. When hunting, sperm whales routinely dive to depths of 2000 feet and greater, holding their breath for more than 45 minutes!
Between 1800 and 1987, commercial whaling killed hundreds of thousands of sperm whales, decimating these populations. People hunted these whales to use spermaceti in oil lamps, lubricants, and candles until the 1986 moratorium on commercial whaling. Today, sperm whale populations are thought to be recovering, but these and other marine mammals remained threatened by vessel strikes, entanglement in fishing gear, ocean noise, marine debris, and climate change. By learning more about our amazing neighbors and our impact on nature, we can make better decisions to protect these species for generations to come.
Read more about sperm whales in this resource from NOAA. Join us at the whale to learn more and to make your own climate action plan (h/t to Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson)!
Physeter macrocephalus. Did you know that sperm whales sleep vertically? Photo by WWF Australia.
Listen to Whales – Bioacoustic Monitoring
Ocean Song offers open bioacoustic monitoring, via “A distributed network of underwater microphones, monitored continuously by machine learning. Detecting whale vocalizations as they happen, across two oceans.”