Evening Concert Series is a video-catalogue documenting improvisational interactions within specific environments. Each year, multi-media artists Rachel Sherk and Aaron Rourk choose a location to explore as they seek the answers to their fundamental questions of the series: What is place? How does a place come to have meaning?  How does one develop a relationship with a new place?

To answer this question, Sherk and Rourk turn their gaze to the spaces that make up a place. Using video to document daily interactions with specific spaces, the artists meditate on sound, light, distance, color, weather patterns, etc.  This is a time of rapid climate change paired with rapid technological development. In this series, the artists attempt to find moments of quiet contemplation with the Earth.  They seek to use technology as a way to bring contemporary viewers into a dialogue with the spaces the Earth creates every day in the hope that people will take time, even just a moment, to engage with nature; to come back to the Earth—our place, our home.

Just as a collection of spaces come together to create a place with all of its associated meanings, our impact as a collection of individuals compounds to create a changing force much more powerful than that which one person alone could muster.

We view these collections of videos as a prayer of sorts—a multi-part meditation—for the places that create our world.  We find these videos joyful in a time when the state of our world is bleak.  We know that change starts from a seed of thought, and we hope to encourage viewers to take a moment to enjoy their own spaces, those that they themselves have planted and those in which they themselves are merely passers-by.  In engaging with the natural world, we hope viewers will take ownership over their interactions within their environment.

We cherish these places that we have found within our explorations as we create Evening Concert Series, and we hope to inspire new viewers to see them in a new light, hear them with fresh ears and experience them in new ways. It is human nature to engage with our planet: we have been doing so since our beginning.  Evening Concert Series allows us to be deliberate in our engagements with the places that make up our world—we invite you, the viewer, to enjoy and engage with the places that we have come to know.  We encourage (we demand!) you to go forth and experience your own places, go and be present in the spaces that make up your world.