Unfiltered Love

Unfiltered Love is a performance devoted to presence—an exploration of intimacy as it unfolds when artists, musicians, and audience gather without mediation or defense.

Set within the intimate darkness of Bed-Stuy, the work values the raw, unfinished, and trembling edge where creative freedom is still alive.

Through live jazz, hip-hop, painting, and projection, the performance creates a space of liminality—where sound listens to itself, gestures cannot be revised, and devotion is practiced in an age of distraction.

At its core, Unfiltered Love is a technological ritual layered onto ancient acts of painting, music, and gathering. Projection mapping enters as ephemeral beauty—light that filters, distorts, and briefly animates the painted surface before disappearing. The painting holds memory, the projection holds life, and the performance holds the moment they meet. This fleeting nature sharpens perception, heightening attention and revealing the tension between surface and essence as the work becomes and fades in real time.

The performance also reflects the conditions of modern love: we often fall in love with projections before people, and intimacy begins in imagination before encounter. Rather than resolving this tension,

Unfiltered Love inhabits it—offering an homage to temporary intimacy and its capacity to affect us for a lifetime. What is given is not perfection but presence, not spectacle but risk. In remaining with the unfinished and the unfiltered, the work asks what becomes possible when attention itself is treated as an act of love.

Artist Statement, Roger Ridley

Unfiltered Love

1177 Bedford Avenue, New York City 

February 12 2026