Thursday, July 30, 2015

upcoming group show at LACA - a new video piece

The Recorder Was Left On, Or The Closer I Get To The End The More I Rewrite The Beginning[1]
Doa Aly, Alejandro Cesarco, Yann Novak, and Steve Roden
Curated by Suzy Halajian
Los Angeles Contemporary Archive (LACA)
Opening August 7th, 7-9pm
August 7 - September 26, 2015
It is much simpler to come to a conclusion, or a pause perhaps, rather than to return to the beginning again and again. The same is true of returning to a source, which appears new upon each inspection. It shifts, it reacts, it digresses, it is read differently and is experienced in unfamiliar ways. Perspectives on layered meanings evolve. As the artists in this project return to and re-read material, an affected consideration of words, sounds, and objects emerges. The original meaning is oftentimes made unclear, muffled, obliterated, and many times distanced from the source material.

That said, we do not aim to abandon our sources. This project allows artists to thoroughly consider and reconsider the study that urges the question. What can extended meditation on material achieve? What possibilities arise out of the arduous process of compulsive artistic research? The cross-references, new symbols, and variant languages make room for alternative subjects and accounts to materialize, even if only through the fissures. And the likeliness that a retelling through erasure, obfuscation, or misreading can advance certain possibilities once unanticipated, or deemed too mundane, to reach the surface.

The Recorder Was Left On, Or The Closer I Get To The End The More I Rewrite The Beginning[1] takes up artists’ practices that share a meditation on archival and source material — including historic, literary, and personal. These contemplative processes demand a slowing down to reconsider various subjects, such as James Joyce’s novel, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Marquis de Sade’s novella Justine, and Domus magazines from the 1960s. References serve as entry points to other kinds of personal stories, some more legible than others, and to allow a multiplicity of meanings to unfold through a suspension of knowing. New contradictions and constructions help us understand the established narratives that surround us and illuminate states of idleness, loss of communication, disturbance and upheaval in a revolutionary state, as well as abstract, reinterpreted images found in archives. Given this process, the subjects no longer occupy the space of the source material, but inhabit those imagined spaces, contrasting history with the present and layering various narratives.

This project insists the viewer stay present with the work at hand, to enter an artistic space of self-directed meditation. LACA provides an entry point. Works are dispersed throughout the site, colliding with the physical archives and suspending the viewer within a non-conclusive space, including a workspace, artists’ books, documentation, and ephemera, collectively offering a site of production and dissemination. Most importantly, it invites the individual to enter a mode of reflection that understands that the work that initiates this process will only escape us, that it will later shift into another thing, and then another: “What we call texts escape us as the dream escapes us in waking, or the dream evades us in dreams…The text will end up by beginning.”[2]

Doa Aly's (Cairo) video work, Hysterical Choir of the Frightened (HCF) (2014), borrows from Marquis de Sade’s 1791 text Justine, and also takes up an Egyptian newspaper article on the most recent protests in Cairo during which opposition protesters’ efforts were immediately halted in Tahrir Square on January 25, 2014 — the third anniversary of the Egyptian revolution. What is being said and to what means remains unclear given the references are not made apparent, as Aly sets up a theatrical scene a choir of four women quietly stating passages from the text, shot in a slow, circular pace and advocating violence through a shared desire.
Alejandro Cesarco's (New York) three prints, A Portrait of the Artist Approaching Forty (I-III) (2013)[3], capture a subtle, slowing down of the artist through the close-ups of holes, scratches, and fillings that mark the surfaces of the artist’s studio and the artist’s body. Yet the traces visible on the prints remain indiscernible from one another. James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man offers Cesarco his departure point along with other works in this series. Cesarco’s video work, If in Time (2012), portrays two characters from his previous video, Methodology, now found sitting and reading texts aloud to one another as their only form of communication. An estranged scene is dramatized, yet the role of the text is never understood: she reads her own text and he reads a text he is writing about her work.

Yann Novak’s (Los Angeles) sound installation, Idleness, Endlessness (2015), deliberates multiples sites and moments in time, drawing from the environment Novak recorded while attending the Parkfield Artist Residency in 2012, and the material he later processed in his studio over a three-year period and also used in live performances. The final compositions were created through improvisation with the insertion of periods of inactivity to simply contemplate where the piece had come and where it should go. Altered photographs of the sky taken at his residency frame the single two-hour composition, and offer a personal, nostalgic encounter with a more leisurely moment — one that sets up a tension within the LACA workspace.

Steve Roden’s (Pasadena) video work, knockin on heaven’s door (2015), expands upon a series of works — photographs, collages, and paintings — that began in 2014, during a residency, exploring a group of Domus magazines from the 1960s that belonged to Roden’s father. The silent video presents a simple visual motif — an opening and closing of a door — revealing a series of images. While many images are found images, others are personal, such as a pair of paper chairs that were in his grandparents house, a small Italian radio, and Robert Rauschenberg. The collection can be seen as an archive of orphaned images, not necessarily derived from the artist’s past. The title alludes to Roden's father's death and his love of Bob Dylan.
-

Tuesday, July 28, 2015

get your tickets for resonant forms NOW!!!!!!!!!!!

*** EARLY BIRD PASSES NOW ON SALE***
 

VOLUME and LACE present the second Resonant Forms festival 

for three days from September 11 through 13, 2015.

This year’s festival will present unique performances

 by a range of artists in the emergent fields of 

experimental electronic music, sound, and performance art. 

The artists featured in this festival represent 

varied approaches to the interplay of artistic mediums, and take risks 

not frequently observed in traditional creative modalities.

Lineup subject to change, visit resonantforms.com for the most current schedule.


September 11 – 13, 2015
LACE
6522 Hollywood Blvd
Los Angeles, CA 90028
Tickets $20 – $70
Click here to purchase tickets


Resonant Forms will take place
inside i have never been here before,
an immersive
installation by Los Angeles based
artist Rafa Esparza. The artist has transformed
 the architecture of the gallery into a
space absent of corners, unified by curve,
and made out 5,000 adobe bricks that he
has produced with the help of his father
and extended family members.


September 11
8:00PM - 11:00PM
Simon Scott
Bethan Parkes
Jen Boyd
Touch (live mix)

September 12
8:00PM - 11:00PM
Lawrence English
John Chantler
Paul Clipson
Steve Roden

September 13
8:00PM - 11:00PM
Rafa Esparza
Raquel Gutierrez w/ Adam Garcia
Nikki Darling

September 13
12:00PM - 4:00PM
The Radical Listener
Field recording, Workshop

September 11
Resonant Forms opens with an
evening of performances by
three artists associated with
acclaimed UK experimental
sound label, Touch. Organized by Touch
label head Mike Harding, this evening
features a rare performance
bySimon Scott, a multi-instrumentalist, sound 
ecologist and drummer (formerly ofSlowdive
from Cambridge, UK. 
Glasgow based sound artist 
Bethan Parkes explores the inherent 
dimensionality of sound through 
multi-channel/ambisonic 
compositions and installations.
 Jen Boyd is a sound artist and 
curator based in Northern 
California who works with 
field recordings of the natural 
world, forgotten spaces, 
and the environment. The evening 
will also feature a DJ set by Mike Harding

September 12
In celebration of their 15th Anniversary, 
Australian music label Room40 will 
present performances by Lawrence English, 
John Chantler, Steve Roden, and film 
projections by Paul Clipson. 
Lawrence English, who founded the label, 
is a composer, media artist and curator 
based in Australia. He investigates the 
politics of perception to create works 
that ask audiences to become 
aware of that which exists at the 
edge of perception. UK based artist
 John Chantleruses technology to 
exploit the inner zones of audible 
electricity, exploring texture 
and dimension with a relentless 
ferocity. Paul Clipson is a 
filmmaker who often collaborates 
with sound artists and musicians 
on films, live performances, and 
installations. His Super 8 and 
16mm films aim to bring to light 
subconscious visual preoccupations 
that reveal themselves while 
working in a stream of consciousness 
manner, responding to and conversing 
with the temporal qualities of musical 
composition and live performance. Steve Roden
is a visual and sound artist from Los Angeles. Roden’s
 working process uses various forms of specific 
notation and translates them through self 
invented systems into scores, 
which then influence the 
process of painting, drawing, sculpture, 
and composition.

September 13
Resonant Forms will conclude 
with a series of performances 
organized in collaboration with 
LACE Assistant Director Shoghig Halajian. 
For the closing night of both the festival and 
Esparza’s i have never 
been here before, these artists 
will explore notions of race, 
identity and belonging in 
response to the installation. 
Rafa Esparza is a multidisciplinary 
artist whose work ranges in medium from 
installation, sculpture to 
drawing, painting, and most 
predominantly live performance. 
Woven into his many bodies 
of work are his interests in 
history, personal narratives, 
and kinship. Raquel Gutiérrez is 
a film actor, curator, publisher, 
playwright, arts administrator, 
and community organizer. 
She writes about art, culture, 
music, film, performance and 
community building and creates 
original solo and ensemble 
performance compositions.
 Nikki Darling is 
a third generation Angelino 
on her father’s side and 
Neomexicano on her mother’s. 
She is a feminist, womanist, 
transcendentalist, Unitarian Universalist. 
She believes in Henry David 
Thoreau, Elizabeth 
Taylor, Gloria Anzaldua, 
and Joseph Campbell. She believes 
in people, and she believes in you.

September 13 Workshop
The beauty of field recording 
is that it can happen anywhere. 
This September, join Lawrence 
English as he casts his ears 
towards Hollywood Blvd. Hollywood Blvd. 
is one of the iconic visual landmarks
 of the city, and it also happens to 
contain a diverse sound world. 
Join us as we explore various 
“sound locations” in the 
neighborhood, collect 
recordings, share techniques/methods 
and discuss the ways in which field 
recordings can be used in 
sound art and music practices.


Resonant Forms is made possible 
by the generous support of 
mediaThe foundation Inc. Additional support provided by 

Friday, July 10, 2015

free performance at the pasadena museum of california art this sunday, july 12 2 PM with mem1

performance at the pasadena museum of california art july 12 at 2pm, in conjunction with my exhibition with alexandra grant. mem1 are old friends and great musicians and i'm very happy to be able to perform with them here (since they live on the other coast!)...

while the performance is "free" bear in mind the museum does have an admission fee...