Compass – Performed by Zachary James Watkins at Headlands Center for the Arts
Sunday, April 13, 2025 | 1-2pm
Location: The Commons at Headlands Center for the Arts (944 Simmonds Road, Sausalito, CA)
Free event
Compass (2021) features a solo electric guitarist who interprets a score by Raven Chacon in an outdoor performance. The score guides the performer in responding to and engaging with their immediate surroundings. Oakland-based musician Zachary James Watkins will perform the score in response to the Golden Gate National Recreation Area. The performance will last approximately one hour.
Compass is preceded by Background Music, a performance at 11am also composed by Chacon. Both performances are presented in partnership with Headlands Center for the Arts and in conjunction with The Blinding Light, the group exhibition at Slash curated by Diego Villalobos featuring work by Chacon. Background Music and Compass are hosted during Headlands’ Spring 2025 Open House (12-5pm), which features additional programming, including artist open studios, lunch for purchase, and readings.
Raven Chacon is a composer, performer, and visual artist who creates videos, prints, photographs, and installations that bring sonic experimentation into the gallery. Score-based creation is fundamental to his practice, encouraging generous forms of collaboration among performers and audiences, sights of significance, nonhuman actors, found sounds, and natural elements. In this way, he connects Diné (Navajo) worldviews and relationship models with Western classical, avant-garde, and art-music traditions. Chacon was born in Fort Defiance, Arizona within the Navajo Nation and lives and works in Hudson, NY.
Zachary James Watkins studied composition with Janice Giteck, Jarrad Powell, Robin Holcomb and Jovino Santos Neto at Cornish College. In 2006, he received an MFA in Electronic Music and Recording Media from Mills College where he studied with Chris Brown, Fred Frith, Alvin Curran and Pauline Oliveros. Watkins has received commissions from Cornish College of The Arts, The Microscores Project, the Beam Foundation, Somnubutone Radio Series free103point9.org, sfsound, and the Seattle Chamber Players. He has performed in numerous festivals across the United States, Mexico and Europe. Watkins has been an artist in residence at the Espy Foundation, Djerassi, and the Headlands Center for The Arts.
*For inquiries about accessibility or to request an accommodation, please email ana@slashart.org.
This event is generously supported by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.