(serene music)

- My music is meant to move energy, to change something.

Something that feels heavy, I wanna create lightness.

Something that feels too dark,

I wanna be able to bring a spot of light to it.

My name is Lady Midnight and I am a visual artist,

performing artist, and vocalist.

I was born and raised in St. Paul.

I claim the west side is where I grew up

so I feel like I'm connected because just of my childhood

but I also know that my mother

is connected to that space, too.

♪ Que bonitos ojos tienes

♪ Debajo de esas dos sejas

♪ Debajo de esas dos sejas

♪ Que bonitos ojos tienes

♪ Ellos me quieren mirar

♪ Pero si tu no los dejas

♪ Pero si tu no los dejas

♪ Nisiquiera parpadear

♪ Malaguena salerosa

♪ Besar tus

♪ Labios quisiera

♪ Besar tus labios quisiera

♪ Malaguena salerosa

Describing my work to people is really difficult.

I think it's a mixture of performance.

It's a mixture of ritual.

It's a mixture of meditation.

Also a groove and also space.

Space is something that I've been obsessed with,

particularly with visual art.

I started doing photography when I was in high school.

My father was a photographer

and so I felt a connection with him.

He passed away when I was 13

and so this felt like something that I could do

to sort of bring me closer to him.

And I went to the Minneapolis College of Art and Design.

I studied that and I felt this huge responsibility

to photograph my community

because nobody else was photographing them.

So, this is a series that I did.

I think it was shown in a coming-of-age exhibition

at the Minnesota Museum of American Art.

So, the work first started, I think, as portraiture

and then it started to shift

to more of an internal investigation.

Kind of creating characters but then also

creating these still lives.

That kind of mimicked, I think,

the process of what was happening internally for me.

And then, you know, totally the aesthetic of Lady Midnight.

That then shifted into music

and I recognized how freeing it was to become somebody else.

♪ From the quiet streams and average hearts ♪

♪ Came from great eruptions from the start ♪

I've always sang.

I sang myself to sleep as a baby.

As an infant, I would just hum to myself

until I fell asleep.

So, I don't know if I ever was apart from music.

So, this is my first notebook

when I started writing songs when I was seven.

It shifted from this fascination of love and longing.

Of course, as an adolescent,

you're just feeling everything so intensely.

And I think it became more of an investigation

of the world around me, not just the world inside of me.

My artwork has always been a catalyst

for me to understand myself

and to understand really difficult events

that have happened in my life,

with the album itself being about a lot of death,

"Death Before Mourning," you know,

and it was a way that I processed a lot of loss.

So even though this is a really poppy song and everything,

it's still dealing with this message

of investigation of self.

In college, I was asked to create a self-portrait.

Just had to shoot, develop, and print this work

and I put it up on the wall and had everybody critique.

And almost immediately, my professor asked me

what my relationship was with my father.

And I was stunned and I said, "Well, he's no longer living."

She could tell because of the piece

and I never even thought about how my art can be

such a window into really difficult things.

I had thought that I had healed from that

but in making my work, it just showed me that

there was so much more that I hadn't actually discovered.

Sometimes it happens in my songs as well.

Either intentionally or unintentionally,

things will come up.

So, I see art as a direct link

for me to be able to find healing,

for me to be able to investigate myself,

and I translate that process and share it with other people

to help them to do the same thing.

When I released "Death Before Mourning,"

I was really intentional with having it function

to heal people.

I think that I have a gift also kind of a duty

coming from descendants of healers

to be able to use my work in a way that helps people.

I don't call myself a healer.

I don't think I'm a healer; I think I'm an artist.

But I think that my work can have healing qualities.