houston 5/19/19: Michael Jevon Demps

For his participation in Mud + Blue, Michael Jevon Demps (Detroit / Richmond) spent five days visiting sites related to Houston’s sounds. Considering the intertwined legacies of musical forms from the city alongside the sounds of freeways and grackles, water and accordion, Demps is creating a new body of work that takes the muddiness of the blues as a central framework for defining the sounds of a place. His research playlist can be found here.

Demps is a multidisciplinary artist whose work questions his/our bodies in relationship to power and oppressive social structures while creating conditions, in space and time, that critically engage with communities as audience and collaborator. He aims to compose works that invoke seeking and sharing experiential knowledge in order to envision and empower new strategies for navigating a constantly shifting social, political, intimate, and spiritual world.