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"Antony Hegarty, the lead singer of Antony and the Johnsons as well as a visual artist, is at the center of two bicoastal arts affairs this week. On January 21 Hegarty\u2019s&amp;nbsp;first solo exhibition&amp;nbsp;opened at UCLA\u2019s&amp;nbsp;Hammer Museum&amp;nbsp;in California. On Thursday, January 26, the artist will unveil his&amp;nbsp;Museum of Modern Art-commissioned performance, \u201CSwanlights,\u201D at New York\u2019s&amp;nbsp;Radio City Music Hall.Hegarty\u2019s multidisciplinary interests began in his early teens. \u201CI\u2019d always been drawing and I had always been doing music,\u201D he says. Hegarty, who is transgender, was born in England in 1971, but was raised around the globe, including Amsterdam, and the San Francisco Bay Area. He was rejected from London\u2019s Royal College of Art, winding up at NYU, where he eventually studied experimental performance. From there, he immersed himself in the nightlife and New York\u2019s underground queer community. He started a performance collective that performed at the Pyramid Club when the East Village was still rough. \u201CIt was a wonderful initiation into adulthood,\u201D Hegarty recalls. His group went on to perform at venues like&amp;nbsp;PS 122, becoming the earliest incarnation of the Johnsons that he performs with today.The UCLA Hammer Museum exhibition, entitled&amp;nbsp;\u201CAntony,\u201D&amp;nbsp;is a retrospective of sorts, displaying about 50 collages and drawings from the late \u201890s to 2011. A thick stroke of ink covers the page of a magazine in one piece; another mixes paint, chalk, and ink in a finger-print like pattern. Although Hegarty practiced visual arts from a young age, it wasn\u2019t until 2005, after achieving success with his band, that he began to pursue it more intently.\u201CI started retreating into drawing as a way of claiming personal space,\u201D Hegarty explains. \u201CIt was about something very personal, very internal, as opposed to a dialogue with thousands of people every night.\u201DHegarty had begun musing on the idea for a performance that combined his haunting voice, light, an orchestra, and visuals when artist&amp;nbsp;Marina Abramovic&amp;nbsp;suggested he try something other than traditional concert lighting, where the pattern changes according to the song. Abramovic asked Hegarty about creating a longer arc, across an entire concert. \u201CShe actually was the first person to suggest to me that I do a concert that starts in pitch blackness and ends in bright white,\u201D he says.\u201CSwanlights\u201D is the culmination of that suggestion. Hegarty describes it as \u201Ca meditation on light and darkness and on the luminosity of quartz crystal within the blackness of a mountainside.\u201D As MoMA PS1&amp;nbsp;director and MoMA curator at large&amp;nbsp;Klaus Biesenbach,&amp;nbsp;who declares that \u201CAntony is unlike any artist,\u201D explains, \u201CIt\u2019s not really not like a concert \u2014 there are inflating and deflating walls after drawings he made, there\u2019s a huge mobile hanging from Radio City and from the stage ceiling, and there is this rotating laser.\u201D\u201CSwanlights\u201D was originally set to be staged in MoMA\u2019s atrium, but after realizing the venue was too small, Hegarty and Biesenbach decided on Radio City Music Hall because the large space still feels intimate, and because its dome-like structure fits so well with the notion of a crystal. The performance, in extension of Hegarty\u2019s 2009 performance at the Manchester International Festival, \u201CThe Crying Light,\u201D is a sort of homecoming for the project.\u201CIt\u2019s interesting now to bring a piece on this scale, which is definitely the largest-scale performance I\u2019ve ever done \u2014 at Radio City, a theater I\u2019ve always dreamed of performing at,\u201D Hegarty reflects. \u201CI had the opportunity to bring the piece home in a way.\u201DClick through the photo gallery to see highlights from \u201CAntony,\u201D at UCLA\u2019s Hammer Museum January 21 to May 13.[content:advertisement-center]&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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