The Philosophers: Zoe Scofield & Juniper Shuey

Ages: 33, 36
Hometown: Gainesville, Ga., Santa Cruz, Calif.
Current Neighborhood: “Capitol Thrill”
Pets: Leolo (Malamute dog), Ping (cat)

Juniper Shuey was a photographer and video artist. Zoe Scofield was a dancer and choreographer. Then they met, fell in love and became co-creators of zoe | juniper, a company that produces mesmerizing experiences using dance, light and images. By blending performance and visual art, the duo engages its audience emotionally, intellectually, kinesthetically. In doing so, they push the boundaries of genre.
“How do we create an experience that gives people an opportunity to understand something about themselves?” Shuey asks.

Last summer, their most recent collaboration, A Crack in Everything, premiered at the prestigious Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival in Massachusetts before rocking sold-out audiences at On the Boards in December. This month, Scofield and Shuey remix that 70-minute stage experience as an installation at DiverseWorks in Houston. Like the performance, the installation spills over with mirrors, projections and movement, eschewing linear narrative in favor of sprawling ideas about time and identity.

“My brain thinks in constellations, in convergences of ideas,” Scofield says.

By creating an installation out of a performance, she and Shuey not only produce a new kind of work, they develop a new approach to the way they work.

“It’s a super exciting, invigorating, honest way of working—almost like a methodology,” Scofield says. “It loosens everything and creates a new understanding of possibility inside the material.”

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Photography by Kyle Johnson.