Sean Noyce

Prayers for Rain is a new media installation that examines Utah’s precarious relationship to water through the lens of ritual, drawing on folk magic traditions from the region’s colonial past.

In arid landscapes, water has always existed as both necessity and uncertainty, shaping settlement, survival, and belief. While technological innovation enabled civilizations to endure these conditions, periods of drought often gave rise to ritualistic attempts to influence the natural world. Across cultures, systems of magic and superstition emerged as parallel forms of knowledge for negotiating environmental instability when science failed.

In Utah, early colonial communities carried with them a hybrid of beliefs from the British Isles, Scandinavia, Greece, and Indigenous traditions. These practices are catalogued in Anthon Cannon’s “Superstitions and Popular Beliefs from Utah” (1910-60), an archive of mythologies shaped by both migration and landscape. Among them is the recurring belief that killing a snake and hanging it on a fence will bring rain. This gesture is tied to older mythologies of sacrifice and seasonal renewal, including the dragon-slaying narratives of medieval Europe, as depicted in the Christianized St. George.

Prayers for Rain reconfigures this ritual for a contemporary context. Resin-cast golden serpents hang nailed to a white Gothic fence post, forming a central sculptural axis within the gallery. Behind it, a looped computer-generated video, composed from imagery of the Great Salt Lake at high water, unfolds as a shifting, reflective environment. The gallery itself becomes a kind of reliquary: an intimate, reverent space where symbolic remnants are preserved.

For the opening, Noyce will present a performance with sonic collaborator Johnny Gimenez at Meanwhile Park, in the backyard performance space behind the gallery. Expanding the installation into a live environment, the performance integrates video projection, sound and sculpture, while encouraging audience participation. Gimenez, the former frontman of the New York post-punk band Tyburn Saints, introduces a sonic framework of layered guitar, degraded tape loops, and rhythmic structures that echo rainfall and incantation.

Audience members are invited to participate in a collective water ritual, using cooperation to pass a ladle of water across the performance space, while contributing spoken or sung elements via an open microphone. These inputs are captured and folded into the evolving soundscape, transforming individual gestures into a communal act. Through participation, Prayers for Rain proposes ritual as a living system that oscillates between desire and uncertainty.