Laleh Khorramian is a visual artist working in a vacillating process between digital animation and collages, monotypes and painting. Her work is based on the premise of experimenting with the process of chance as a starting point for discovering possibilities of the unknown, whose details and outcomes she then investigates and repositions. Bizarrely personal and absurd, her works seek to communicate the uncanny as a constructed parallel universe. From these investigations she attempts to open a space where fiction can capture aspects of life that are normally invisible. Khorramian integrates fiction with spectacle and theatre constructions to explore the discarded and chance outcomes as a creative strategy to consider transience of living matter and beings and its cycles of depletion and plenitude. She was born in Tehran, Iran, and lives and works in New York.
Sean Daly is an Actor and Production Designer, living between Los Angeles and New York City. He has worked in feature film, television, and commercial advertising. He also works exclusively as a charachter architect for feature films such as “Sherlock Holmes”, (2009), “The Solosist”(2010), “Seven Psychopaths (2012). Daly trained in Improv and Long Form Sketch Comedy, with both the Acme and Groundling theater companies in Los Angeles.
Shahzad Ismaily is a composer and musician of Pakistani descent. He is a self-taught musician who spent his formative years in Tempe, Arizona before moving to New York City in February, 2000. His recent works include films scores for Frozen River, a narrative feature that won the grand Jury prize at the Sundance Film Festival this year, and has contributed compositions for recordings with Laurie Anderson (upcoming), Marc Ribot (Ceramic Dog), Will Oldham (Lie Down in the Light), Jolie Holland, Raz Mesinai (Safe), and Secret Chiefs 3 (Xaphan/John Zorn); and music for the choreographers Min Tanaka and Jo Kreiter.
For her residency at Watermill, visual artist Laleh Khorramian will be utilizing the time to develop the lead performance as well as soundtrack for an upcoming Science fiction film installation called M-Golis. Her focus will be on developing the main character, portrayed by actor Sean Daly. They will focus on character study, unearthing the psychological framework for the work, as well as storyboarding.
The film’s narrative is set on the planet M-Golis, a once-habitable planet ravaged by chemical waste. Now, only prisoners sentenced to reverse the pollution by distributing remedial mushroom spores remain. The film investigates the life of one of the inmates, Lieutenant Aurelio Swimm (Sean Daly), and his relationship with the land, a hallucinogenic landscape of towering mushrooms and toxic transformation that echoes and influences his psychological state.
The musician and composer Shazad Ismaily is a frequent collaborator, and the M-Golis soundtrack will be their fourth collaboration.