Sean Noyce

Sean Noyce and Johnny Gimenez premiered their second collaborative project, Prayers for Rain, at Meanwhile Park in Salt Lake City, Utah, on July 25–26, 2026. The project featured choreography by Channing Sargent, directorial assistance from Jeff Paris and Alexas Lucero, and production by Katya Usvitsky. Drawing on folk magic traditions from Utah’s colonial past, Prayers for Rain examines the region’s precarious relationship with water through the lens of ritual.

In arid landscapes, water has long existed as both necessity and uncertainty, shaping settlement, survival, and systems of belief. Although technological innovation allowed civilizations to endure these conditions, prolonged drought often inspired ritual attempts to influence the natural world. Across cultures, magic and superstition emerged as parallel systems of knowledge for negotiating environmental instability when practical solutions proved insufficient.

In Utah, early colonial communities carried with them a hybrid of beliefs from the British Isles, Scandinavia, Greece, and Indigenous traditions. Many of these practices were documented in Anthon S. Cannon’s Superstitions and Popular Beliefs from Utah (1910–1960), an archive of folklore shaped by migration and landscape. Among its recurring beliefs is the practice of killing a snake and hanging it on a fence to bring rain — a gesture connected to older mythologies of sacrifice, seasonal renewal, and dragon-slaying narratives that later became embodied in the Christian figure of Saint George.

Prayers for Rain reimagines this ritual within a contemporary context through an immersive environment combining sculpture, projected video, sound, and live performance. At its center, resin-cast golden serpents are nailed to a white Gothic fence post, referencing the historic rainmaking ritual while functioning as a contemporary icon. Behind them, projections of snakes writhing across the desert floor, acid-burned aerial imagery of the Great Salt Lake, and psychedelic patterns recalling early rave culture, creating a shifting landscape that oscillates between ecological collapse and spiritual transcendence.

Expanding beyond installation, the live performance invites the audience into a collective act of participation. Gimenez, former frontman of the New York post-punk band Tyburn Saints, constructs an evolving sonic environment from layered guitar, degraded tape loops, and rhythmic structures that evoke rainfall and incantation. Audience members passed a single ladle of water across the space through a collective chain while playing handheld egg rattles that mimic the sound of rattlesnakes. These gestures are captured and folded back into the evolving soundscape, transforming individual actions into a communal ritual.