Raven Chacon is a Diné composer and artist who creates musical experiences that explore relationships among sound, space, and people. Chacon’s experimental practice cuts across the boundaries of visual art, performance, and music, breaking open musical traditions.

For Several Eternities in a Day: Form in the Age of Living Materials, Chacon composed sound pieces that take over the exhibition’s architecture. He created field recordings inspired by the themes and artworks in the exhibition’s three acts. For “Act I: Bleeding, Breathing, Crumbling Form,” the artist placed microphones deep in the earth and recorded ambient sounds at low decibel levels. We perceive these guttural recordings as vibrations emanating from a wall at the exhibition entrance. The field recordings Chacon made for “Act II: Cosmic Abstraction and Communal Form” manifest more subtly as a sonic portal into the second section of the exhibition. Viewers will experience a brief burst of frequency as they move through the space. This sound piece converses with the moving landscape in artist Sky Hopinka’s film and the landscape paintings in the section. As visitors move through the doorway into “Act III: Clay and the Manifestation of Form,” they will encounter a field recording of the music of ocarinas. These small wind instruments are made of clay and found in archaeological sites dating back to the Preclassic Maya period. The ocarinas in this sound work are played by the force of wind rather than by human breath.

Chacon received a BFA from the University of New Mexico (2001) and an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts (2004). The artist divides his time between New York and New Mexico. From 2009 to 2018, he was a member of the art collective Postcommodity, and is a recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship (2023) and the Pulitzer Prize in Music (2022). His work has been presented at numerous venues and festivals including SITE SANTA FE (2024); the Whitney Biennial, New York (2022); the Borealis festival in Bergen, Norway (2021); the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin (2021); the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2020); the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago (2020); the Vancouver Art Gallery (2019); and the San Francisco Electronic Music Festival (2013).

Organized in conjunction with Several Eternities in a Day: Form in the Age of Living Materials, on view at the Hammer through August 23, 2026.