Zarah Cabañas
Zarah is a multidisciplinary artist whose work spans video art, performance, music, poetry, and immersive environments. As Co-Founder of Space Acres Studios, she has built a distinguished career creating live video art commissions for major cultural icons including Blue Man Group, The Roots, and Dave Chappelle. An NYU Tisch Film/TV alumna, her current work explores the intricacies and absurdities of love, connection, and desire.
Artist Statement
My work lives in the tension between the profound and the ridiculous, the erotic and the ephemeral, the intimate and the unknowable.
I am drawn to the ways frequencies shift relationships between people, to the ways energy changes spaces. There is a wild universe in the spaces between words, in the sounds that connect us, in the gaze between lovers. I love to explore this charged terrain through the senses. The intricacies of love and desire have obsessed me for as long as I can remember: how a single moment can reshape our existence, and the absurd ways we chase connection.
My work has primarily taken the form of video art. I create alchemical worlds of ephemeral textures anchored by a 90’s broadcast-studio aesthetic and a mischievous, sensual pulse. Performing globally as VJ Lady Firefly and shaping ephemeral, transformative, and alchemical experiences for thousands has taught me that true, lasting connection begins with the creation of intimacy, no matter the scale of the arena.
Music and poetry are at the center of my practice. Words emerge; melodies come and go. They are my most immediate points of entry into the collective unconscious. Nature and the study of Filipino martial arts offers other portals, sharpening my attention to cycles, seasons, movement, proximity, and spatial discipline. These practices reflect my attraction to edges: unusual places, blurred distinctions, and the tension between instinct and rigor. Perhaps this is why my work often thrives outside traditional artistic spaces.
Increasingly, I am exploring intimacy more directly. Where I once circled around it, my current work approaches attraction, anticipation, vulnerability, and the charged experience of being seen with curiosity and courage.
