Connie Beckley was born in Pennsylvania in 1951. While her interest in the relationship between art and music was apparent from adolescence, she chose to receive her formal education in music with private training on keyboard and in voice. In 1973, Ms. Beckley moved to New York and entered the visual art world with her musical background. She participated in the works of other artists and composers who shared her interdisciplinary interest, most notably Einstein on the Beach, 1976, by composer Philip Glass and director Robert Wilson. At the same time she was beginning to develop her own distinct style as a composer and performance artist. Her sound installations in art galleries and other exhibition spaces continued to reflect a dialogue between the visual arts and music. By the mid-eighties, she began to think of her performance work as "temporal sculptures," and to focus on the musical element more lyrically. In her performance of "Spiral Cloud" a pianist played a theme and variations on a baby grand piano in an open field, surrounded by a spiral of black helium balloons, at first attached to the ground and in series to themselves, then gradually released into an evolving and rising spiral. In another performance that initiated a solo exhibition, Connie Beckley constructed a glass spiral while tethered to two microphones (one in real time, one on a delay) and sang in harmony with herself. The resulting sculpture remained on display, in silence. Her current series of musical compositions, texts, performance, sculptures and paperworks are part of a series entitled The Aquarium, fantasies based on a day in the life of an urban observer. The performance, which included six other musicians, was presented at the opening of the Steirischer Herbst Festival in Graz, Austria, in September '95. A version of the music was released on CD at the same time. Future presentations will include a performance at the Lincoln Center Festival 97. Sculptures and paperworks from The Aquarium was presented in December '95 at the Nicholas Davies Gallery in New York City. A project site for The Aquarium has just been completed and is sponsored by Hard Press, Inc. It will include the texts, graphics, and sound. Ms. Beckley has presented her work in both commercial and public cultural institutions throughout Europe and North America, including the New Music America Festivals, The Venice Biennale, The Paris Biennale, and the Museum of Modern Art. Reviews and articles in publications including The New York Times, Arts, Artforum,Tel Quel, Flash Art, and Art Press. Fellowships include the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Arts. "...Connie Beckley is a composer and performance artist of distinct individuality; her work is suffused with a cool methodology that can clarify emotion or confound it ... [her] performances occupy that elusive but powerful nether world between theater and music-- a form of small scaled but intense lyric drama that may some day soon blossom into full-dress opera." --John Rockwell New York Times "...is difficult to describe in terms of conventional forms of art as it is neither painting, sculpture, music nor theater; yet it seems to borrow something from each. Of the four, the work seems to have the most in common, formally, with theater as it is a kind of narrative built upon a relationship between audio and visual elements, the meaning of which is derived metaphorically." --Tiffany Bell Arts Magazine "Beckley has shown that she can negotiate these difficult passages-- between music and "art," "real" time and manipulated time-- with intelligence, toughness and grace." --Jane Bell Art News "...sculptures evidence her canny ability to incorporate properties she finds in music into palpably accessible visual form..." "... reveal Beckley's ability to mine the formal and symbolic possibilities of everyday materials and objects." --Jenifer P. Borum Artforum