Half-Winged Summer Exhibition

Join us to celebrate the opening of
Matthew Ritchie + Shara Nova's Half-Winged

Half Winged is an immersive musical and visual installation built around a single, devastating question. Are we truly free?

Created by longtime collaborators, composer Shara Nova and visual artist Matthew Ritchie, Half Winged is a choral cantata — part song cycle, part ritual, part elegy — that maps humanity’s oldest pattern: the drive to build something new, something bigger, something more beautiful, only to question it, destroy it and begin again.

This ambitious yet accessible work is anchored in a magnificent 70 minute recursive musical score recorded using a spatialized Atmos sound system and featuring an extraordinary ensemble of singers, live and recorded instruments.

AI is a new form that combines old questions with new hazards, not only allowing us to envision multiple futures, but to rediscover and reimagine lost histories, blurring ‘what-might-have-beens’ with myths of creation, choice and crisis repeated across every age.

Addressing pressing contemporary issues of choice and the impact of technology by drawing on and remixing fragments of texts ranging from the Enuma Elish to Paradise Lost, W.E.B. Du Bois, Princess Steel, Walter Benjamin’s Angel of History, and Paul Klee’s Pedagogical Sketchbook; Half Winged gives this pattern a structure through a cast of characters in a feature-length multi-screen AI-generated video, named after the programs used in Large Language Models.

The Discriminator, entropy’s angel forever facing backward, ; the Generator, the wind of change pressing blindly forward; the Transformer, the Composer, the Gardener, the Weaver, and finally the Child — a character voiced entirely by artificial intelligence — who returns, across every act, to the same unanswered question: “Are we truly free?”

The artists’ own prior collaborations were used as the primary prompts for the Large Language Model. Sora was used to generate multiple alternate versions of each scene. Sora closed on April 26, 2026. It was the most expensive failure in AI history.

The work features singers Daniel Bubeck (the Discriminator), Robert Wesley Mason (the Gardner), Mikaela Bennett (the Weaver), Hanna Benn (The Composer), Sam Amidon (the Transformer), and Shara Nova (the Generator). CJ Camerieri and Dave Nelson are the army of brass, along with drums by one and only - James McAlister. Choirs hail from the University of North Texas directed by Dr. Kristina McMullen.

The installation is accompanied by a series of watercolors and the music will be released as a double album later this year.

Learn more about the exhibition and artists here. Entrance is free!

Matthew Ritchie + Shara Nova’s Half-Winged opens Saturday, May 16, from 5-8pm. The exhibition will be on view from May 16 - August 15, 2026

This project was generously funded by Knight Foundation New Works grant and New Music USA.