Mariah Garnett

In 1924 Ruth Deyo, a young American concert pianist, visited Cairo on tour. While there, she purchased an ancient stone bust as a gift for her patroness. On the boat back to New York, the sculpture began talking to her, and she decided to keep it, and move to Cairo permanently. Thus began a lifelong love affair between Ruth and the spirit housed within the portrait head, named TAA. Ruth transcribed their communications in her diaries: flowery love letters, esoterica, theories about the origin of man and speculative political futures, and perhaps most importantly, the location of a large sum of money which would enable her to produce her work. All of this was distilled into a never-produced opera which TAA and Ruth co-wrote, called A Diadem of Stars, about ancient Egyptian pharaohs Akhenaten and Tutankhamun, cast as peacekeepers in a time of perpetual war. Mariah Garnett is Ruth’s great-grandniece.

The Pow’r Of Life Is Love interpolates meditations on spirituality, mental health, and artmaking into family history and grand operatic spectacle through the artist’s queer lens. Garnett takes Ruth’s diaries and score as inspiration, both acknowledging and straining against her family's complicity in pervasive systems of colonialism and cultural appropriation. The video begins with a staging of Act III, Scene I of Ruth’s opera, A Diadem of Stars. This is the first public presentation of the music, which reappropriates and deconstructs Ruth’s Egyptomania to create a newly-inflected operatic vignette that centers performers of color. True to its title, The Pow’r Of Life Is Love celebrates  the virtuosic talent and longstanding friendship of soprano Breanna Sinclairé, a renowned professional opera singer, and tenor Christopher Paul Craig of the LA Opera. The pair met at San Francisco Conservatory of music, where Sinclairé was the first transwoman to earn a masters in the opera program. Originally conceived as a romantic love scene, Garnett’s staging calls to mind other configurations of love, empowerment, survival, and familial and human connection as the two central figures orbit around each other like planets, singing about their shared mystical visions. The second part of the video is culled from Ruth’s diaries from the 1930s, which chronicle her frustrated artistic ambitions and soothing psychic dispatches received from her spirit lover—reinterpreted here as a portrayal of queer desire—who sings in a chorus of AI-generated voices.

In her freely perverse adaptation of Ruth’s vision, Garnett dispenses with any distinction between artifice and reality and leaves us grappling with the transcendences that art so often sets itself up to accomplish.