Lenka Clayton and Phillip Andrew Lewis

Five-Hundred Twenty-Four

Five Hundred Twenty-Four, a single-channel video installation by Lenka Clayton and Phillip Andrew Lewis, features singers from over twenty Cleveland-area choirs counting numbers in an iterative process: one person sings “one”, then two people sing “two”, and so forth, to 524. Each choir was filmed separately, and the artists weave together the audio while the video features each choir individually. The juxtaposition of different contexts in which singing occurs functions as an embedded sociological study of various communities throughout the region. 

As artists living in Pittsburgh, PA, Clayton and Lewis have long worked in their individual and joint practices with particular communities. Here, they were inspired by the statistic that one in five US households includes someone who is part of a choir. As basic human forms, both singing and counting are ways to explore our tenuous connections to others and learn new ways of being together in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.

This work marks the formation and dissipation of a new group made up of pre-existing groups who usually operate separately behind closed doors in different corners of the region. Although the singers may have not been all in the same room, they become one collective musical body through the artists’ digital efforts—a way of fostering community many have become comfortable with through the COVID-19 pandemic. While the piece is sung with a collective voice, every individual is uniquely tasked to begin and end counting at their specific number. The score is a roll call, an audit, a measurement performed by the measured. The work takes on wider relevance as a mobilization of disparate communities amid a time of social fragmentation in the USA. Concluding with a threshold choir who sing the final numbers of the sequence, the work speaks to larger cycles of life, death, and renewal.