Name: Peter Dayton: Dark Garden
Start: 2024-07-01T00:00:00
Location: Guild Hall

Peter Dayton

Guild Hall

Traversing the Atlantic, Indian and Pacific Oceans, Silkroad presents a brand new trio seamlessly blending three disparate narratives of language and sound. Three internationally acclaimed, genre-bending artists who each have been credited with reshaping the landscape of their respective instruments through their unique improvisational styles and compositional voices. 

Hailing from Damascus, Syria, Kinan Azmeh has been taking the international music scene by storm with his unique blending of Eastern and Western styles, bombastic improvisation and large-scale compositions for orchestras such as the New York Philharmonic, the London Philharmonic and the Seattle Symphony. 

Acclaimed composer and instrumentalist Kaoru Watanabe‘s work is grounded in traditional Japanese music while imbued with contemporary jazz, improvisation, and experimental music elements, working with such figures as Laurie Anderson, Jason Moran and André 3000. 

Scottish harper and composer Maeve Gilchrist has been credited with bringing the Celtic harp to new levels of visibility through her unique improvisational and textural approach to the instrument and her collaborations with artists such as from Arooj Aftab, Yo-Yo Ma, The Scottish Chamber Orchestra and Esperanza Spalding.

Silkroad Up Close: Kaoru Watanabe, Kinan Azmeh, and Maeve Gilchrist

After a nearly decade-long career as a punk rock musician, Peter Dayton returned to visual art upon moving to East Hampton in the mid-1980s. Dark Garden is a site-specific installation created for Guild Hall’s stairwell leading from the lobby to the balcony of the Hilarie and Mitchell Morgan Theater. Dayton’s exploration of flowers began when he found discarded issues of House and Garden magazine from the 1950s near his home, and his collages utilize photocopied flowers from seed catalogs, which links his practice to the work of Andy Warhol and other pop artists. He chooses visually arresting images of flowers without leaves and stems—images devoid of sentiment, emotion, or specific references—allowing the flower forms to create their own patterns.