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Kasumi, a 2011 Guggenheim Fellow and professor at the Cleveland Institute of Art, has created “Happy Birthday Summer,” an original looping videoart installation for the Cleveland Museum of Art’s 2011 Summer Solstice Party. The massive projection will span the south façade of the museum.

In her colorful midsummer’s night dreamwork, Kasumi’s signature eye-popping imagery flows in uninterrupted cascades into a polyphony of metaphysics, realism, pulp fiction, and Dadaist paradoxes. “Every ‘statement’ suggests its opposite and even casual observations are turned upside down,” Kasumi said of the work. “‘Happy Birthday Summer’ mimics the currents of our unconscious thoughts, moving in uncanny directions towards unknown—and vividly memorable—realms.”

In each of the last two years, at least 4,000 people attended the museum’s Summer Solstice Party. Once again, the museum welcomes the longest day of this year with an all-night party celebrating the creative spirit. Jazz and soul, African and electronica, and many other rhythms will fill the air, shifting throughout the evening as the atmosphere evolves. Appetizers, beverages, and a few surprises will make this a night to remember. The party runs from 6pm to 2am on Saturday, June 25. For more information, go to clevelandart.org.

Kasumi’s involvement in this project is the result of a partnership between the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Cleveland Institute of Art, and Cleveland Public Art, which is a nonprofit organization dedicated to working with artists and designers to transform public spaces.

Kasumi is internationally celebrated as one of the leading innovators of a new art form synthesizing film, sound, and video in live performance. This past year she has taken a sabbatical from CIA to focus on multiple projects around the country. The video-sharing website Vimeo announced that Kasumi’s work “BREAKDOWN the video” won the Remix category in the inaugural 2010 Vimeo Awards. Her work QUADRASCOPE premiered with the Cleveland Orchestra in 2010, "Panoptical Delusions" was featured at the 2010 Ingenuity Festival in Cleveland, and she executive produced the feature film Aardvark. Last fall she was named a CPAC Creative Workforce Fellow and this spring she was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship. For more information, go to about.me/kasumifilms.

image: ©2011 kasumifilms