FRAMEWORKS | Celia Hollander

This new performance from Celia Hollander examines the emergent relationship between physicality and culture that gives life to a place. Drawing on Hollander’s personal loss of her house (Altadena) and childhood neighborhood (Palisades) in the 2025 fires, the piece incorporates footage of walks through both neighborhoods a year and a half after the fires. Musically, the piece bridges the geologic scale of landscape alongside rhythms of daily life, through processing and arranging familiar sounds within a palate of natural harmonics. The performance will conclude with a phone chorus, emphasizing the collective presence that ultimately gives a place its identity. In this 2026 season of the Wende Museum’s experimental music series FRAMEWORKS, each featured artist will develop an interdisciplinary performance considering both domestic and public spaces as they relate to the artist’s singular perspective. The artists will reflect on the subtle implications of space, as functional and measurable records of cities or cultures; versus place, the conceptual and felt imaginings of the familiar or alien. Embodying the Wende’s ethos of promoting research into dynamic global networks and processes of transformation through an experimental lens, the series’ bimonthly, site-specific performances examine the “frameworks” through which we narrate the past and imagine the future; they complement the Museum’s exhibitions and programs while simultaneously acting as channels to contemporary scenes alive in Los Angeles. Celia Hollander is a Los Angeles based composer, producer and performer. Combining acoustic and digital elements, her work focuses on themes such as shaping time through composition, surrendering to improvisation, and music as a natural phenomenon of dynamic systems. Her discography features releases on Leaving Records, Longform Editions, and Recital and she has performed at venues including 2220 Arts & Archives (LA), Public Records (NYC), Grace Cathedral (SF), Basilica Hudson (NY) and Bond Chapel (CHI). She has composed original music for feature films including Union County (Sundance 2026), Good One (Sundance 2024), and Dad & Step-Dad (2023), as well as for short films, television, theater, dance, art installations, and VR projects. She has taught acoustics and composition at the Herb Alpert School of Music at California Institute of the Arts, where she completed her MFA in Music Composition and Experimental Sound Practices. Doors to the A-Frame Theater will open at 1:45 p.m. and the performance will begin at 2 p.m., followed by a garden reception until 4 p.m. Please note that the A-Frame Theater doors will close promptly at the start of the performance, and late entry will not be permitted. RSVPs for this free program do not guarantee admission to the A-Frame Theater. Limited seating will be available on a first come, first served basis. An ADA-accessible entrance to the Wende Museum’s Community Center is available through the garden gate from the parking lot, which will open at 1:30 p.m.