Location One » Search Results » evolving

2×2: New Randy & Bob Holman w/ Vito Ricci

irp — Fri, 02 May 2008 05:01:26 +0000

2×2: New Randy & Bob Holman w/ Vito RicciFriday – May 2nd, 20088:00 pm poetry, 9:00 pm showtickets $15

Reservations 212.334.33472×2 brings together two poet/musician duos in a night of New Poetry, Old School styleNew Randy is poet Holly Anderson (“density and loneliness of the City” (NYTimes)) and musician Lisa B. Burns (“my personal favorite”(Lenny Kaye)).Bob Holman, proprietor of the Bowery Poetry Club, is “Dean of the Scene” (Seventeen). Vito Ricci is “Downtown Musician Laureate #1” (World Magazine).New Randy: Q. What happens when a blue-eyed writer and a dark-haired singer conjure Sappho drinking vodkas in a neighborhood bar? A. They start writing about The Nature of Longing and the Longing for Nature. “If you’re young and taking love too seriously, if you’re old and giving up on it, if you’re a guy who can’t figure out women, if you’re a woman who’s not sure how strange you are, you could probably learn something from New Randy. Sure, it’s home-made… all the good stuff is.” –Jennifer Kelly, Splendid Magazine.Bob Holman w/ Vito Ricci perform from their new CD “The Awesome Whatever” (Bowery Records): Bob Holman, an originator of the Spoken Word and Slam Poetry scenes, shows how it’s done in nine tracks (plus an Easter Egg encore), produced and with music by his long-time collaborator in rhyme, master musician of Maspeth Vito Ricci. With the zipzap influence of the Hipperama of the Classics, Lord Buckley, and the on-kilter space shots of Captain Beefheart, Holman glides cross genres, boundaries and streams of consciousness like a your own personal tour guide on the road to Nirvana. “Nice work, Bob.” –Lou Reed

Click here to view the embedded video.

- – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – -The Awesome Whatever!First CD in 9 Years from the “Dean of the Scene” (Seventeen Magazine)(when the scene is Poetry!)Holman’s last CD, “In With the Out Crowd” was produced by needle-drop wizard Hal Willner and released by the ahead-of-its-time, lamented Mouth Almighty/Mercury Records, a label Holman founded in the mid 90s with music vet Bill Adler and legendary poet Sekou Sundiata. THE AWESOME WHATEVER is the first release of Bowery Records, part of the amazing goings-on at the Bowery Poetry Club where Holman is proprietor.The all-live, one-session, no overdub THE AWESOME WHATEVER is a milestone in Spoken Word. Holman’s most recent book, A Couple of Ways of Doing Something (Aperture, 2006), a gorgeous, oversize collaboration with Chuck Close, adds a new graphic dimension to his poems so they stand up and dance with Close’s lush daguerreotypes. Likewise, in TAW, Holman expands the vocabulary of spoken word by actually improvising lyrics, adding gestural sounds as oral tradition placeholders, and making poetry journeys exploring genres from Reggae to Lounge to Flamenco.“Vito called me up one day and said he’d found a terrific studio, that’s how it all started,” says the Czar of the Spoken Word (Daily News). “Spin Studio on Astoria, how rootsy can you get? And Nic K as engineer — the guy was cracking up in my ear as I was improvising, the greatest solo audience a poet could ever have.”“A studio is a tool for creating poetry,” Holman continues. “Just as a comfy, inspiring writing space and a great pen and paper, or a keyboard that’s weighted and clacks appropriately are conducive to getting the words down on paper, so a studio where you can really hear yourself pushes the poem out in a relaxed, adventuresome way.”You can count Bob’s admirers on both hands, feet, and various other body parts: he and jazz violinist Billy Bang have an ongoing band, Bang Holman; he performs often with David “Pere Ubu” Thomas in his opera Mirror Man (recording available on Thirsty Ear); and in 2006 was in the original cast of Spalding Gray’s “Stories Left to Tell.” Lou Reed’s in Bob’s camp (“Bob is my kind of poet”), Ani Di Franco gives him “an A+!” and Russell Banks relates, “”Holman’s funky urban chants call back good memories of Beat collaborations between poetry and music. He’s keeping that tradition alive and well.”The opening cut, “She Never Phoned Me Back,” has the craziest history. Bob was performing at the University of California, San Diego, in a series curated by the great jazz poet Quincy Troupe. “We always try to get Bob on the radio, “ says Troupe, “because he speaks poetry. This day the host challenged Bob to put his theories into practice by improvising a poem right on the air! Bob suggested that the engineer throw down some beats, and they had a caller call in the title: “She Never Phoned Me Back” The result was totally outta sight, and was completely off the dome!” “I had several poems spread out in front of me,” remembers Holman, “”How Kora Was Born” for my griot, the Gambian poet/musician Papa Susso and “Ornettes” for Ornette Coleman – I was spending time with Ornette then. So I mixed, matched, hitched and hatched and the beats were infections. It just happened.” Indeed.The remainder of the tracks were all recorded at Spin Studios on April 12, 2007.The next track is the CD’s Break Out Hit: “Love Lake.” Written for Bob’s wife, the artist Elizabeth Murray, who died in August, this poem answered Vito’s challenge: “Bob, if you can write anything, why not write a hit song?” “Love Lake,” the result, begins with one of poetry’s great couplets: “You never thought it could happen to you/ I never thought the same thing too.” In the live TAW version, Holman takes on the glottal crunch of a carny pitchman gradually evolving into a heart-rending plea for transcendent universal love. The tune is chock full of what Holman calls “oralities”: those little spoken catch phrases between verses, the “uh-huhs” and “so far away I couldn’t hear it myself” commentaries of which James Brown was the master, and for poets in the oral tradition, serve both as fillers while the next verse is being concocted, and as the true improvisational interchanges with the audience that make a poem an event. Too much theory? Give a listen, and see if you don’t gently float downriver to the unity of the species which is “Love Lake.”The next cut, “The Meaning of Meaning,” is a totally deconstructed poem/song. It begins with Bob requesting Vito to do the Other Poem, which of course turns out to be the song they are doing right now! Confusing, you betcha, totally appropriately too: “What’s the meaning of meaning/What’s the purpose of purpose/ What’s the use – Can I use it/It feels so good to refuse it!” wails Holman. One critic called Bob and Vito’s version at the annual St Mark’s Poetry Project New Years Day Marathon, “Best of Show,” adding – “it was like hearing the individual beaten down by the implacable forces of history.”The next poem, “January,” is an ode to a “chilly-willy of a month,” a “month that seems like a year,” that keeps losing its place, falling in love, and forgetting it’s a poem. “Pasta Mon,” a hilarious paean to a Yuppie’s inability to break into reggae, “Pasta Mon starrin on hiz own tv show/Yesterday’s menu’s already obsolete-o/ Gonna show you how to roll a pasta-filled burrito.” Things get darker by the end:A nickel for a can & a nickel for a bottleA trickle down sound from the nickel that bought youAmerica the Beautiful in quarantineA cardboard mattress and a cardboard dreamBarbecue trashcans linin the HudsonDogs are howlin as you throw the spuds onPasta Mon’s recipes gettin kinda smellyRat ratatouille & vermin vermicelliThree poems with music follow – a praise poem “For Paul and Everybody Else” written for Paul Gulielmetti, the activist tenant lawyer who died last year, segues through a long musical ramble to “Night of the Living Dead,” addressed to two of Bob’s friends, Spalding Gray, the writer/monologist, and Pedro Pietri, the dada Nuyorican poet/playwright. Though they never knew each other, they meet in the poem, as they did in death – Gray’s body washing ashore after his wintertime suicide leap from the Staten Island Ferry just days after Pietri died on March 2 or 2, 2003 (he was on a plane at midnight between time zones when he passed, which is a point in the poem) from stomach cancer. Another praise poem for Pedro, “On the Street Named Pedro Pietri,” follows, a poem that was read in celebration on the day that East Third between B & C was declared “Reverend Pedro Pietri Way.” In 1989, Holman helped reopen the Nuyorican Poets Café on this block, and the Poetry Slams he ran 1989-96, the first in the City, were landmarks in the renaissance of poetry.“sweat&sexandpolitics,” one of Bob and Vito’s original raps from their touring show “Panic*DJ! The Plain White Rapper,” is recapitulated in a stripped-down very 07 version. The final cut is a long spoken word piece, “Picasso in Barcelona,” an ekphrastic (work of art inspired by another work of art) suite of poems based on Picasso’s teenage work as when he lived in Catalonia:In 1900 the futureOpened up its armsI invented the carAnd RembrandtTake off your clothesI will make a book coverAnd put a photo of me on the backTo make sure it sellsEvery morning I wake upGive myself a big kissAnd paint a masterpieceThen I have a coffeeThus ends THE AWESOME WHATEVER. If you want to hear the encore (secret track), well, the CD is enclosed! On the CD, the listener is dared to “See if you can tell which of Bob’s filigrees are straight off the dome.” For Bob, working in collaboration with Vito and Nic, gave him the support to take it all the way out – to launch his improvisational poetic skills to create a new kind of poem, which is in fact, the original way poems were written, I mean spoken! It’s Awesome! Whatever.

2×2: New Randy & Bob Holman w/ Vito Ricci

admin — Fri, 02 May 2008 05:01:26 +0000

2×2: New Randy & Bob Holman w/ Vito RicciFriday – May 2nd, 20088:00 pm poetry, 9:00 pm showtickets $15

Click here to view the embedded video.

- – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – -The Awesome Whatever!First CD in 9 Years from the “Dean of the Scene” (Seventeen Magazine)(when the scene is Poetry!)Holman’s last CD, “In With the Out Crowd” was produced by needle-drop wizard Hal Willner and released by the ahead-of-its-time, lamented Mouth Almighty/Mercury Records, a label Holman founded in the mid 90s with music vet Bill Adler and legendary poet Sekou Sundiata. THE AWESOME WHATEVER is the first release of Bowery Records, part of the amazing goings-on at the Bowery Poetry Club where Holman is proprietor.The all-live, one-session, no overdub THE AWESOME WHATEVER is a milestone in Spoken Word. Holman’s most recent book, A Couple of Ways of Doing Something (Aperture, 2006), a gorgeous, oversize collaboration with Chuck Close, adds a new graphic dimension to his poems so they stand up and dance with Close’s lush daguerreotypes. Likewise, in TAW, Holman expands the vocabulary of spoken word by actually improvising lyrics, adding gestural sounds as oral tradition placeholders, and making poetry journeys exploring genres from Reggae to Lounge to Flamenco.“Vito called me up one day and said he’d found a terrific studio, that’s how it all started,” says the Czar of the Spoken Word (Daily News). “Spin Studio on Astoria, how rootsy can you get? And Nic K as engineer — the guy was cracking up in my ear as I was improvising, the greatest solo audience a poet could ever have.”“A studio is a tool for creating poetry,” Holman continues. “Just as a comfy, inspiring writing space and a great pen and paper, or a keyboard that’s weighted and clacks appropriately are conducive to getting the words down on paper, so a studio where you can really hear yourself pushes the poem out in a relaxed, adventuresome way.”You can count Bob’s admirers on both hands, feet, and various other body parts: he and jazz violinist Billy Bang have an ongoing band, Bang Holman; he performs often with David “Pere Ubu” Thomas in his opera Mirror Man (recording available on Thirsty Ear); and in 2006 was in the original cast of Spalding Gray’s “Stories Left to Tell.” Lou Reed’s in Bob’s camp (“Bob is my kind of poet”), Ani Di Franco gives him “an A+!” and Russell Banks relates, “”Holman’s funky urban chants call back good memories of Beat collaborations between poetry and music. He’s keeping that tradition alive and well.”The opening cut, “She Never Phoned Me Back,” has the craziest history. Bob was performing at the University of California, San Diego, in a series curated by the great jazz poet Quincy Troupe. “We always try to get Bob on the radio, “ says Troupe, “because he speaks poetry. This day the host challenged Bob to put his theories into practice by improvising a poem right on the air! Bob suggested that the engineer throw down some beats, and they had a caller call in the title: “She Never Phoned Me Back” The result was totally outta sight, and was completely off the dome!” “I had several poems spread out in front of me,” remembers Holman, “”How Kora Was Born” for my griot, the Gambian poet/musician Papa Susso and “Ornettes” for Ornette Coleman – I was spending time with Ornette then. So I mixed, matched, hitched and hatched and the beats were infections. It just happened.” Indeed.The remainder of the tracks were all recorded at Spin Studios on April 12, 2007.The next track is the CD’s Break Out Hit: “Love Lake.” Written for Bob’s wife, the artist Elizabeth Murray, who died in August, this poem answered Vito’s challenge: “Bob, if you can write anything, why not write a hit song?” “Love Lake,” the result, begins with one of poetry’s great couplets: “You never thought it could happen to you/ I never thought the same thing too.” In the live TAW version, Holman takes on the glottal crunch of a carny pitchman gradually evolving into a heart-rending plea for transcendent universal love. The tune is chock full of what Holman calls “oralities”: those little spoken catch phrases between verses, the “uh-huhs” and “so far away I couldn’t hear it myself” commentaries of which James Brown was the master, and for poets in the oral tradition, serve both as fillers while the next verse is being concocted, and as the true improvisational interchanges with the audience that make a poem an event. Too much theory? Give a listen, and see if you don’t gently float downriver to the unity of the species which is “Love Lake.”The next cut, “The Meaning of Meaning,” is a totally deconstructed poem/song. It begins with Bob requesting Vito to do the Other Poem, which of course turns out to be the song they are doing right now! Confusing, you betcha, totally appropriately too: “What’s the meaning of meaning/What’s the purpose of purpose/ What’s the use – Can I use it/It feels so good to refuse it!” wails Holman. One critic called Bob and Vito’s version at the annual St Mark’s Poetry Project New Years Day Marathon, “Best of Show,” adding – “it was like hearing the individual beaten down by the implacable forces of history.”The next poem, “January,” is an ode to a “chilly-willy of a month,” a “month that seems like a year,” that keeps losing its place, falling in love, and forgetting it’s a poem. “Pasta Mon,” a hilarious paean to a Yuppie’s inability to break into reggae, “Pasta Mon starrin on hiz own tv show/Yesterday’s menu’s already obsolete-o/ Gonna show you how to roll a pasta-filled burrito.” Things get darker by the end:A nickel for a can & a nickel for a bottleA trickle down sound from the nickel that bought youAmerica the Beautiful in quarantineA cardboard mattress and a c
ardboard dreamBarbecue trashcans linin the HudsonDogs are howlin as you throw the spuds onPasta Mon’s recipes gettin kinda smellyRat ratatouille & vermin vermicelliThree poems with music follow – a praise poem “For Paul and Everybody Else” written for Paul Gulielmetti, the activist tenant lawyer who died last year, segues through a long musical ramble to “Night of the Living Dead,” addressed to two of Bob’s friends, Spalding Gray, the writer/monologist, and Pedro Pietri, the dada Nuyorican poet/playwright. Though they never knew each other, they meet in the poem, as they did in death – Gray’s body washing ashore after his wintertime suicide leap from the Staten Island Ferry just days after Pietri died on March 2 or 2, 2003 (he was on a plane at midnight between time zones when he passed, which is a point in the poem) from stomach cancer. Another praise poem for Pedro, “On the Street Named Pedro Pietri,” follows, a poem that was read in celebration on the day that East Third between B & C was declared “Reverend Pedro Pietri Way.” In 1989, Holman helped reopen the Nuyorican Poets Café on this block, and the Poetry Slams he ran 1989-96, the first in the City, were landmarks in the renaissance of poetry.“sweat&sexandpolitics,” one of Bob and Vito’s original raps from their touring show “Panic*DJ! The Plain White Rapper,” is recapitulated in a stripped-down very 07 version. The final cut is a long spoken word piece, “Picasso in Barcelona,” an ekphrastic (work of art inspired by another work of art) suite of poems based on Picasso’s teenage work as when he lived in Catalonia:In 1900 the futureOpened up its armsI invented the carAnd RembrandtTake off your clothesI will make a book coverAnd put a photo of me on the backTo make sure it sellsEvery morning I wake upGive myself a big kissAnd paint a masterpieceThen I have a coffeeThus ends THE AWESOME WHATEVER. If you want to hear the encore (secret track), well, the CD is enclosed! On the CD, the listener is dared to “See if you can tell which of Bob’s filigrees are straight off the dome.” For Bob, working in collaboration with Vito and Nic, gave him the support to take it all the way out – to launch his improvisational poetic skills to create a new kind of poem, which is in fact, the original way poems were written, I mean spoken! It’s Awesome! Whatever.

Snake Alley @ Taipei Cultural Center

irp — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 14:47:37 +0000

Snake Alley @ Taipei Cultural Center on March 19, 6-8pm
Location: 1 East 42nd Street NYC 10017 (close to 5th Ave.)

Snake Alley is part of Asian Contemporary Art Week which connects leading New York City galleries and museums in a citywide event comprising of public programs such as exhibitions, receptions, lectures and performances. The Week focuses on the broad spectrum of artworks produced by Asian contemporary artists working in their home countries and abroad. Please see details from http://www.acaw.net/ACAW2008/aboutacaw/

Snake Alley is a two-venue group exhibition of cutting-edge Taiwanese contemporary art at The Taipei Cultural Center and The Gabarron Foundation Carriage House Center for the Arts—Curated by Eric C. Shiner

Deep in the midst of Taiwan’s capital Taipei lies the Wanhua District, the city’s most historic area and home to Longshan Temple, the city’s oldest religious structure. The area was also home to Taipei’s red light district and a tourist attraction called Snake Alley where live animals including snakes and turtles were displayed in small cages—and often publicly killed for the extraction of their blood which could be consumed on site for good health and sexual prowess— until animal rights activists successfully brought the practice to a stop in the 1990s, or, more likely, pushed these activities behind closed doors, and thus ending this spectacle that was interweaved with tradition and hucksterism writ large. Today, it is a place filled with restaurants, night markets and shops, reflective of the bustling hub of the gleaming modern city that surrounds it. Yet, at the heart of Wanhua lie the secrets of Taipei’s past, a conceptual and shared history that artists from Taiwan have looked to again and again for subject matter that so often plays out in their work. In SNAKE ALLEY, the work of many of Taiwan’s most prominent contemporary artists shows how they are negotiating the epic changes that have occurred over the last two decades in Taiwan as the nation has exploded economically, and how they rectify those changes with an at times troubling past.

All of the artists in the exhibition examine the secrets, shadows and growing pains of contemporary Taiwanese culture. By no means pessimistic, their works smartly analyze the underground aspects of a specific site bound in the throes of unprecedented growth and informed by the binary of stability versus uncertainty that comes along with it. These artists look at the themes of identity, sexuality, politics and the environment (both built and natural) frequently, making critically-aware art that engages rather than condemns the ever-changing face of Taiwan.

Photojournalist and artist Chang Chien-Chi, for example, often turns his camera’s lens on the unspoken. His best known project comprised portraits of psychiatric patients whose families deeded them over to a temple complex known for taking in the unwanted. In SNAKE ALLEY, Chang again focuses on a topic of current debate in Taiwan: the growing number of older Taiwanese men who are traveling to Vietnam to use a service that matches them with a wife. Chang documents the process from start to finish in his “Double Happiness” series, showing the young women being interviewed, documented and eventually married (in a group ceremony) to their new mates from the other side of Asia. The portraits show resignation and excitement in not only the brides, but the nervous grooms as well, and document the simple fact that due to demographics, there simply aren’t enough women of marriageable age available for every potential husband back in Taiwan.

Twin brothers Chang Keng-Hua and Chang Geng-Hwa collaborate on projects revolving around technology and violence, and the fine line between the two. Here, the brothers display works from their “Shotgun Blue” series, sumptuous imagery of machine guns wrapped in black nylons and set against a rich blue ground. By encasing these lethal weapons in a product used in the construction of beauty—and the occasional bank heist—the Changs attempt to put a soft edge on the hard core realities of a world marred by war and violence, while at the same time critically addressing the media’s fixation on packaging war as a consumer product in and of itself. Young artist Chang Ling also looks at the meeting point of media and culture in his eerie paintings that combine traditional Chinese motifs, such as imagery of animals and nature, with such contemporary subject matter as war planes and mutated bodies. His fleshy and mysterious beasts populate a world riddled with violence, suggesting that Armageddon is upon us, or that it has already come to pass. Painter Wu Tien-Chang also depicts alternate bodies in his work, most often in the form of a strange clown-like character who appears again and again in the artist’s oeuvre. Whether riding a bicycle built for two or rowing in a boat, Wu’s strange and slightly menacing clowns, like Chang Ling’s animals, allow us to imagine a world populated by the completely bizarre.

Contemporary dance wunderkind Chou Shuyi not only pushes into uncharted territory in his choreography and dance performances, but also goes so far as to create installation art within which he stages dance happenings. Seemingly impromptu in nature, his jolting recitals are in actuality very much planned and rehearsed; their manic movements and seizure-like vibrations standing in for the real bodies which navigate the space of a radically-shifting Taiwanese landscape, both actual and psychological. Photographer and performance artist Hou I-Ting also looks at the topic of changing bodies in space by using herself as the primary subject of her work. Hou uses costuming and make-up to create alternate personalities, for example a sexy—yet faceless—figure in Day-Glo fishnets and a neon yellow wig in an early video work, while using a projector in other photo-based work to literally screen other possible selves onto her actual face and body. In so doing, Hou melds fantasy and reality, making us question the limits of both.

Painter Hua Chien-Chiang also creates fantasy environments, often using mythic animals and technologically-enhanced bodies as the main characters in his vivid canvases. In Hua’s world, birds sprouting earphones or USB cables as plumage are the norm, as are human beings with recharger attachment portals and futuristic jetpacks. Here, the past and the future become one, exactly mimicking the actual conditions of society in flux that so defines contemporary Taiwan. Sculptor and installation artist Huang Shih-Chieh also works within this vocabulary, but in radically different—and often large-scale—ways. A representative of Taiwan at the 2007 Venice Biennale, Huang is known for using junk technology as the primary material in his work. Highlighter fluid, cheap plastic shopping bags, remote control toy motors and other odd elements all come together in Huang’s flashing and whirring contraptions as if to bring a sense of optimism to the patchwork nature of life in the here-and-now. For SNAKE ALLEY, Huang installs his massive work Organic Concept in the carriage house of the Gabarron Foundation at 149 East 38th Street. Consisting of just a few box fans and meter-upon-meter of reconstituted plastic bags, the billowing snake form that results inhabits the entire space and is both menacing and tranquil in equal measure. Sculptor Wong Yuh-Shioh also uses the detritus of life—polystyrene foam, marbles, bricks—to piece together fantasy realms based in the realm of nature. Her Jellyfish Lamp sends out a bright light that seems to expose the cheap materials from which it is made, making us question the concept of truth and beauty, and indeed of life itself.

Carrying on with this theme, artist Ku Shih-Yung presents a video work, The Astonishment of What I Have Been Through Abolishes the Aureola of Experience, that features an animated skeleton cavorting on the screen. Part of a larger installation that was presented at the Taipei Museum of Contemporary Art, the work looks at the underpinnings of life and how something as simple as our own biological framework can be construed in a variety of ways, while at the same time charting the course of time on our physical containers. And it is those very containers that photographer Kuo Hui-Chan takes as her subject matter, often times using her own body as the canvas upon which she depicts alternate beings or fantasy environments. Literally painting aspects of architecture, nature and urban views over her skin and clothes, Kuo becomes a chameleon that perfectly blends into her surroundings, whether against a back alley wall in downtown Taipei, or standing in a rice paddy in the countryside. By becoming one with the diverse landscapes of Taiwan, Kuo charts her lived environment by fusing herself to its very make-up.

The youngest artist in the show, Lan Yuan-Hung, also manipulates the body, however does so not to blend in, but to stand out. His grotesque digital manipulations feature men across a variety of age groups and body types lying in their beds in contorted poses and sprouting additional appendages such as an extra leg here or a third arm there. Seemingly depicting the after effects of a toxic spill or nuclear disaster, Lan’s mutants both repulse and attract thanks to their focus on the flexibility of the human form, whether through digital or actual means. Video artist and photographer Lin Hsin-I also features mutants in her animated films and enhanced photography. Here, the artist plays the role of a futuristic nymph with cyber eyes and sockets embedded into her flesh, no doubt a site for the implantation of nourishment, energy or data. Lin’s work often features this cyborg character in lush tropical environments, an effect that makes her robot-like form appear even further distanced from nature. She questions the role of the human corpus as technology gradually overtakes it, positing that at some point in the not-too-distant future we may all begin to morph into hybrid bodies that straddle the binary of nature versus technology. Video pioneer Yuan Goang-Ming also explores this divide in his new series of videos and C-prints composed of endless thickets of lush green leaves, all without life-giving veins below their glistening surfaces. Through using technology to erase an important element of his natural subject, Yuan takes on the role of creator, editor and fabricator in one fell swoop, producing a faux nature that can never exist in real life.

For sculptor Shyu Ruey-Shiann, this same binary has always infused his work with a hard-edged grit and witty sense of humor. Known for his large-scale sculptural works made from old machine parts, working motors, fan belts and gears, Hsu seems to utilize the detritus of industry as the primary building blocks of his elaborate works. Referencing Taiwan’s own loss of industrial jobs due to rising production costs and the migration of factories to mainland China in the 1990s, Hsu’s work gives the past’s mechanical ghosts a new lease on life. Here, his new sculpture Between comprises two standard kitchen garbage cans in metal. When guests use the foot pedal to open the can, they are confronted with a most unexpected barrage: lion roars exploding from the speakers set within. As with his massive churning sculptures, Hsu here too seamlessly blends the natural with the man-made, forcing us to question where the line of distinction between the two truly lies.

Video artist Tseng Yu-Chin also confronts the “man-made” in his work, but not via industrial or technological means. Tseng is much more concerned with the production of identity as it develops in childhood and how the fears, dreams and secrets of our youth remain with us for a lifetime. Perhaps Taiwan’s most celebrated young artist, with a showing at Documenta in 2007 and the recent receipt of China’s most celebrated art prize, the ACCC Award, Tseng has created an entire aesthetic vocabulary based on diverted glances, childhood uncertainty and a sense of longing for something just outside the camera’s frame. Haunting in its loneliness, Tseng’s work takes us back to the universal time of feeling out of place and prompts us to think about the influence these memories have on us today. Novelist and photographer Seven U also takes us back in time, whether through a literary passage about the glories of youth, or through his stark black and white photography that documents the abandoned or hidden space of cities around the world. In his “Low” series, U snaps pictures in old factories and empty buildings throughout Taipei, showing that even in the face of unprecedented development and economic growth, unwanted and unkempt spaces still exist. Indeed, all of the artists in SNAKE ALLEY turn to the secrets and fantasies of a society in flux for inspiration, and in so doing, create works of art that capture the uncertainty, aspirations and realities of life in Taiwan today.

tpecc.org

MAIN GALLERY EXHIBITIONS

admin — Tue, 05 Jun 2007 21:21:52 +0000

We exhibit artists’ work in our main gallery eleven months a year, and often in our two other public spaces as well. All of the work we exhibit is developed at Location One, much of it by artists in our residency program. While Location One seeks to nurture a critical awareness of the implications of technology for contemporary society in both our artists-in-residence and our audiences, and on a practical level, to introduce artists to the possibilities of new media in their art practice, the work we exhibit covers a full spectrum: painting, sculpture, video, digital, audio, installation and performance. It is the convergence of artists working in all these areas which is of paramount interest to us. We believe that collaborations across multiple disciplines, and conversations from many perspectives, produce rich insights and raise critical questions.

SELECTED PAST EXHIBITIONS:

Na Yingyu: Our Homeland! Gone Just Like That

7 March – 6 May 2012
Curated by Jay Brown
Shot in the highland villages of the Jade Dragon Naxi Autonomous
Prefecture of Lijiang, Yunnan, China in 2006 and 2007, this composite of video, sound,
and still images chronicles the encounters of the Manchurian video artist Na Yingyu among the Naxi
people in the sandy pines at the foothills of the Himalaya. This area of the world hosts a richness
of land, family, music, ritual and the natural beauty that someone in the video describes as
“home”. The massive new video installation, consisting of of 59 video “chapters” is arranged as
constellations in a starry night sky.

Project Gallery Events / Exhibitions>>

One And Many

11 January – 15 February 2012
Location One is proud to present One and Many, a group show featuring works by Monica Baptista, Jacob Dahl Jürgensen, Atsushi Kaga, Agnieszka Kurant, David Molander, and Hiraku Suzuki. These artists engage a variety of mediums, from digital film and photography to the traditional art of sewing, transforming one piece into many as they channel possible meta-narratives in their work.

Lilibeth Cuenca Rasmussen: Afghan Hound

29 October – 23 December 2011
Through photographs. sculpture, video, song, costume and performance, Cuenca explores the fragile structure of political hegemony and patriarchal domination. Her premise: When sexuality is repressed, new constructions of gender develop.The title refers both to the long-haired dog breed (the artist uses hair in extreme exaggeration throughout the work) and to Afghanistan (the male-dominated culture from which her characters are drawn).

Sounds Good

15 June – 29 July 2011
Curated by Claudia Calirman
Sounds Good, features visual responses to a collaborative sound piece by artists John Aslanidis, Katy Dove, Phoebe Hui, Sophie Hunter, Miler Lagos, John O’Connell, Gonzalo Puch, and Zane Saunders. The pieces relate to movement, rhythm, vibration, energy, and the expanding visual field.

John O’Connell: Like a Shark in the Grass

14 April – 27 May 2011

The gallery space is transformed with floor-to-ceiling cardboard tubes, a large hand-painted mural, a series of drawings, and a huge papier-mâché structure, creating the sense of a forest that the viewer is invited to explore. This imaginary landscape—in which bizarre and unfamiliar narratives seem to unfold before the viewer’s eyes—is loosely inspired by an earlier drawing by O’Connell, Like a Shark in the Grass (2009), which depicts a ghostly white shark uncannily drifting inside a forest.

Davide Balliano: Giving My Back To The Night I Heard You Lying To A Giant
First Giant

10 February – 19 March 2011

In the exhibition “Giving My Back to the Night I Heard You Lying to a Giant (First Giant)” Davide Balliano uses the myth of Ulysses blinding the Cyclops Polyphemus as a starting point for his representation of the five phases of sleep which he calls the “ancestral fight against the obscure void that blinds us every night”.

Sharon Stone in Abuja
Co-Curated by Zina Saro-Wiwa and James Lindon

5 November 2010 – 22 January 2011

Location One is proud to present SHARON STONE IN ABUJA an exhibition conceived by Zina Saro-Wiwa, British-Nigerian film-maker and founder of AfricaLab, an organisation dedicated to re-imagining Africa. Includes work by Saro-Wiwa, Pieter Hugo, Wangechi Mutu, Mickalene Thomas, and Andrew Esiebo.

Rachel, Peter, Caitlin, John
A Project by Lucy Skaer

16 September – 16 October, 2010
Experimental new work from acclaimed Turner Prize finalist.
Location One is proud to present important new work in 16mm film and sculpture from Lucy Skaer, the young Scottish artist shortlisted for the 2009 Turner Prize and recently featured at the Venice Biennale and the Berlin Biennial
Artist Talk: Friday, Sept 24, 2010, 7pm
with Chrissie Iles, Anne and Joel Ehrenkranz Curator, Whitney Museum

Adel Abidin: I’m Sorry

20 May – 31 July 2010
The piece that gives the exhibition its title-a light box including a sound installation- comes from his experience as an Iraqi traveling in the U.S. In one of his trips, Abidin encountered people from diverse social backgrounds. Yet, surprisingly, every time he mentioned his nationality, the answer was invariably the same: I’m Sorry. Of course, this reply comes as a double entendre: Are people sorry for themselves, for feeling guilty for the infringements imposed by the U.S. on Iraq during the war, or are they sorry for the artist’s fate of being born in such place? The shift of position between audience and self is constantly present in his work.

Joan Jonas:

Drawing/Performance/Video

20 March – 8 May 2010
Drawing is an underlying practice and ongoing concern that Jonas has pursued
throughout her life. All of Jonas’s performance drawings retain a working relationship to her individual video and installation projects. For Jonas, drawings can be lasting and autonomous objects or they may be ephemeral and destroyed during a performance.

Yes, But…

14 Jan – 6 Mar 2010
Yes, But…explores works that dwell in the borderline between real and fictional, process-based and result-oriented, temporal and permanent, literal and metaphorical, orderly and undisciplined. Within the fabric of these works lies an array of artistic choices that emphasize contradictions and ambiguities, playing games upon the viewer at every turn.

Richard Bell: I Am Not Sorry

8 Oct – 25 Nov 2009

Brisbane-based Richard Bell is one of Australia’s most talked-about artists. Bell’s works address–and protest–the commodification of indigeneity in the western art market. They draw attention to frustrations and grievances brought about through the European colonization of Australia. His paintings play with the practice of appropriation, often mining the Pop Art styles of Roy Lichtenstein and Jasper Johns, the paint drips of Jackson Pollock, or the dot matrix style of Aboriginal painter Emily Kngwarreye while including texts that complicate the way we think about racism and race politics.

Virtual Residency 2.0: Levels of Undo

9 Sept – 30 Oct 2009
Location One Virtual Residency Project 2.0: “Levels of Undo” Four artists from 4 different cities, who have never met–and were forbidden to do so during the three months of their “residency”–collaborate on a topic that they had no say in developing. Is this ethical? Are the parameters unnecessarily rigid? Were they able to produce anything worthwhile under such oddly stringent rules?

Conrad Shawcross: Control

20 May – 1 Aug 2009

Extended! 9-26 Sept 2009

Shawcross is known for his multi-media, kinetic sculptures and mysterious structures that are imbued with an appearance of scientific rationality yet beneath the surface are also haunted by the search for the unobtainable and inexpressible. In this new work the artist continues the series of investigations that started with Slow Arc Inside a Cube (2008), which was initially inspired by the late British chemist Dorothy Hodgkin, who said deciphering the structure of pig insulin ‘was like trying to work out the structure of a tree from seeing only its shadow’.

Nicolas Grospierre & Kaeko Mizukoshi: Safe and Hymn.

28 Apr – 9 May 2009
Location One is pleased to present the first of its summer 2009 International Residency Program Exhibitions featuring the work of two outstanding emerging artists, Nicolas Grospierre (Poland) and Kaeko Mizukoshi (Japan). Artist Grospierre will present a photographic installation exploring the intricacies of NYC bank vaults, well timed in light of the global financial crisis. Artist Mizukoshi presents a video installation ste at a Los Angeles bus stop and focused on the dialog between a man, who rants indecipherably, and an awaiting passenger who responds with unrelated religious exclamations.

Laurie Anderson: From the Air: Two Installations

5 March – 2 May 2009
Fostered by the experimental art scene of downtown New York in the early 1970s, Laurie Anderson created her earliest performances in Soho, where Location One is based. In addition to continuing her acclaimed performance work, she has gone on to broaden her artistic practice to include music, video, digital art, and sculpture. Her Location One installation features a duet of video and sound.Location One will organize its inaugural Benefit Gala in celebration of its 10th Anniversary on Thursday, March 5, 2009. Honoring Laurie Anderson and her contributions to the downtown New York art world and beyond, the gala will feature a preview of the exhibition and a special performance that the artist will reveal.

Nayland Blake: Behavior

2 Dec 2008 – 14 Feb 2009
With a surprising dearth of bunnies, Nayland Blake’s: Behavior, a 25-year survey of the renowned artist’s work, will feature some thirty pieces from every aspect of Blake’s career as a painter, sculptor, illustrator, performer, and gorgeinstallation artist. They include the iconic Magic (1991), Heavenly Bunny Suit (1994), a restraint piece, Jim (2000), as well as a generous selection of works never before exhibited in NYC. Nayland Blake: Behavior will be accompanied by a magiccatalogue, as well as by a series of artist-curated performance nights, one of which will include a re-staging of Blake’s “Gorge” (1998).

Catalog availiable.

Jane Philbrick: PULL

10 Sept – 8 Nov 2008PULL confronts an America seemingly crippled by fear and uncertainty. Developed in collaboration with 18 engineers from Honeywell’s Fire Systems Group, PULL urges viewers to realize their hidden desire to sound the alarm, here in the form of an historic fire call box situated in the center of the gallery space. Once triggered, the work blossomsinto a flourish of lights, words and deafening sirens–a wake up call. Philbrick utilizes 502 fire alarms, strobes, smoke detectors, siren horns, control panels–and one customized vintage fire pull station to sound the alarm and remind us to question our notions of security and it’s sources.

Virtual Residency Project: Mission Accomplished

10 Sept – 8 Nov 2008
Can three complete strangers – from different continents, cultures and creative disciplines – collaborate from afar to create a forceful artistic statement about a political event? They can, they have! Their work, prepared without ever meeting face-to-face, uses Google Earth, Second Life, wikis and blog technologies – not to mention old-fashioned hand-printed Agitprop posters – to address the forthcoming U.S. Presidential election. The three artists all speak English, and all are fluent in Internet media. They were given no restrictions other than not meeting in person, and no directions other than the topic of the forthcoming Presidential election. Heather Wagner, director of online exhibitions, coordinated the project for Location One.Mission Accomplished?The chosen three: Susanne Berkenheger (Berlin), Andy Deck(NYC), and Hidenori Watanave (Tokyo)

Jean Shin: And We Move

19 Jun – 26 Jul 2008
Conceived as a site-specific installation, And we move continues Jean Shin’s investigation into the nature of music and its production. The installation utilizes the display of clothing, a video projection on fabric, unwound audio tape, embroidery, and compositional scores on prints, to explore how music is visualized and expressed through movement of the body, and how sound can be imprinted onto a surface.

Aoife Collins: Wet Eye

24 Apr – 14 Jun 2008Aoife’s interdisciplinary practice is shaped by recurrent themes of permutation, multiplicity, cultural paraphernalia and mass identification. She utilizes collage, found object and the reinterpretation of prefabricated forms to communicate new ideas and the mutability of image over context.

Nina Sobell: Internal Message Search

18 – 26 Apr 2008Nina Sobell pioneered the use of video, computers, and interactivity in art, as well as performance on the Web. Since 1969, when she first used video to document participants’ undirected interactions with her sculptures, she investigates the extent to which video enables her to manipulate the relation between time and space, and to create a vortex for human experience, in which the mediated event coincides with public experience, memory, and relationships.

Tracey Moffatt: Social Edit

26 Feb – 19 Apr 2008
Curated by Eric C. Shiner
Moffatt’s narrative films offer the viewer a penetrative gaze into the realities and implicit fantasies that subjugation based on race and gender churns out. In her dual role as cultural critic and maker of art, Moffatt combines hard-edged life experiences with the technologies of video and photography to seam together pastiche-like vignettes that open a window onto the lives of her characters, whether that be an Australian aborigine or an African-American woman.

Xu Tan: Searching for Keywords

28 Nov 2007 – 9 Feb 2008
Xu Tan’s work deals with the hidden motivations and intentions of individuals through a high-tech analysis of their vocabulary. “Searching with Keywords” is the New York leg of an ongoing project which the artist launched in 2005. The project will be unfolding simultaneously in Beijing, China, in Sittard, Holland, and in New York, through a website created specifically for this happening. Gallery audiences in New York will be invited to interact with the keywords, which are presented by means of four video projections and four computer stations equipped with laptops, video cameras, and Internet connections. The goal is to have gallery visitors pronounce the keywords as illustrated in drawings and video clips, to ask questions of the artist thorough an on-line forum and message board, and to leave comments. Their reactions and input will be immediately transmitted through the website to the other venues where the installation is present.

Lida Abdul: What We Saw Upon Awakening

4 Oct – 17 Nov 2007
Location One presents the first New York exhibition by Afghan artist Lida Abdul whose work is rooted in the devastation of war and in a sublimation of healing. In her videos, Afghani ruins appear as images from a dreamscape-both real and surreal-steeped in forgotten histories and mystery.

Nora Ligorano and Marshall Reese: Crater New York: A Lunar Drawing Contest

6 – 26 Sept 2007
On September 26th, Location One was proud to give away three deeds to land on the moon. All you had to do to enter the contest and vie for a chance to own extra-planetary property was show up, draw an image of a moon model that had been installed in the gallery, and then hope the judges liked it! Next stop, NASA – to purchase a de-comissioned space shuttle of course!

IRP Exhibition: Summer 2007

June 2 – July 28, 2007
Location One presents the second IRP group show of the 2006-2007 season, featuring new work developed by our resident artists. The exhibition represents a diverse range of artistic approaches and many are works in progress.Featuring:Jeanette Doyle (Ireland), Cliff Evans (USA), Krist Gruijthuijsen (The Netherlands), Ruey-Hsiaan Hsu (Taiwan, Miguel Palma (Portugal), Bundith Phunsombatlert (Thailand), Jani Ruscica (Finland), and Eric Van Hove (Belgium).

Martha Rosler: Virtual Minefield

13 Apr – 25 May 2007
Location One is pleased to present Virtual Minefield, an installation by Martha Rosler which features two elements: a burlesque of a minefield, as a reminder of current combat zones and as a metaphor of the world political situation, and a mockup of a “phrasealator”, a two-way speech-to-speech device developed by the Defense Department to provide a mechanical translation of set phrases in situations where personnel are unable to speak the local language.

Jeanette Doyle: StarLine Tours

13 Apr – 25 May 2007Location One is proud to present new work by the recipient of the 2006-07 Irish Fellowship award. Ms. Doyle’s practice is primarily concerned with picture making, specifically painting and its relationship to lens-based technologies. The artist manipulates the various media she employs in order to generate very particular effects, questioning the notion of representation and creating a metaphor of what we think we are seeing versus what we actually see or what is given to be seen.

IRP Exhibition: Winter 2007

13 Feb – 31 Mar 2007
Location One presents the first of two exhibitions showcasing new work developed by eight artists participating in the 2006-2007 International Residency Program. Featured works, some of which are exhibited as work-in-progress, represent a diverse range of artistic approaches.Featuring:Natalie Berwernitz & Marek Goldowski (Germany), Teresa Henriques (Portugal), Agnieszka Kalinowska (Poland), Nina Katchadourian (U.S.A.), Rie Kawakami (Japan), Alessandro Nassiri (Italy), Kaori Tazoe (Japan), and Virginie Yassef (France).

Lisa and Nicole Abahuni: In the Sky

21 Nov 2006 – 27 Jan 2007
In the Sky was a multimedia installation, commissioned by Location One, and developed into an exploration into the sharing of the senses and the interconnectedness between perception and sensation as experienced through visual, aural, and physical realms by populating the gallery with strands of metallic beads, a six-channel audio component and a video installation depicting repetitious images that speak to the weaving and unweaving of time and memory.

Artbots: The Robot Talent Show

10-12 Nov 2006
Curated by Douglas Irving Repetto.ArtBots was an international art exhibition for robotic art and art-making robots. Featuring artists Jason Van Anden, Brett Doar, Yoav Bergner and LoVid, Bob Huott & Eric Singer, Mark Esper, Ranjit Bhatnagar, James Powderly and Jonah Brucker-Cohen.

Cliff Evans: The Road to Mount Weather

14 Sep – 4 Nov 2006
Curated by Pieranna Cavalchini, curator of contemporary art, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum
A grand, three-channel moving image installation/projection (15 minute loop) by Cliff Evans. “Mount Weather” is a personal artifice assembled from ideas and images found across the socio-environment of the Internet. Its form is reminiscent of historic epics as represented in cinema and in grand panoramic paintings, while also mimicking the ubiquitous technology used for website banner advertisements.Catalog is available.Sponsored by Location One and the Peter Norton Family Foundation.

Lukasz Skapski: Video and Photographic Works

11 Apr – 20 May 2006
Debut solo show in New York of Polish artist whose work concerns cultural and political issues common to many national groups: the emotional ambivalence of women and nursing mothers, people’s views of the environment in which they live, the legacy of Communist practices in farming communities, as well as the practice and tradition of film itself. In all his work, the artist demonstrates an uncanny ability for capturing people’s circumstances on film and video. Installation sponsored by Location One and the Trust for Mutual Understanding.

Carlos Amorales and Javier Viver: Manimal and The Audience

8 Mar – 1 Apr 2006Mexican artist Carlos Amorales and former artist-in-residence Javier Viver and exhibit video works “Manimal” and “The Audience.” “Manimal” (2005, 6 mins.) is a black and white video animation about the transformation of animal emotions into human rationality. “The Audience” (2005, video and theater chairs, 4.5 minutes) is a three-channel video installation based on El Grand Teatro del Mundo. Sponsored by Location One. Javier Viver’s installation was supported in part by Consulate General of Spain in New York.

Collaborative Exhibition: Slowscan Soundwave (III) and The Telaesthetic Finger

11 Oct – 26 Nov 2005Curated by Heather Wagner”Slowscan Soundwave (III)” was an immense, interactive sound sculpture by artist and dorkbot instigator Douglas Repetto, consisting of enormous strips of sound-sensitive transparent mylar strewn from the ceiling, motors, and custom electronics. “The Telæsthetic Finger”, a selection of works by Kevin Centanni, Atsushi Nishijima and Heather Wagner, function as acoustic crab traps, devices that are cast out and reeled back in, filled with booty…or not. Sponsored by Location One.

Creative Atelier: Open Stitch

7 Sep – 1 Oct 2005
Co-Curated by Claire Montgomery and Sebastien Sanz de Santamaria15 artists spent seven days at Location One working intensely and in restricted conditions to produce wearable creations with only the tools and materials provided to them. A cross between art and fashion, the project temporarily removed the gallery from the appointed function of “showing” and moved it to the world of artistic production, raising questions about the circumstances, both physical and mental, of the creative process. Participating artists: Ayah Bdeir, Jessie Cohan, Barry Doss, Stefany Anne Golberg, George Hudacko, Selma Karaca, Ryan Kennedy, Miranti Kisdarjono, Katherine Moriwaki, David Quinn, Chris Sanders, Davina Semo, and Wikiwikicorp, a collective that includes Jean Barberis, Aya Kakeda and Sebastien Sanz de Santamaria.Commissioned by Location One.

Chris Csikszentmihalyi: Skin & Control

22 Sep 2004 – 26 Feb 2005
Rising out of the gallery floor and disappearing into the walls, two large-scale installations by MIT artist Chris Csikszentmihalyi explores two central technologies of our late industrial society: the airplane and the control panel, rehearsing our dependence on complex technologies and the vulnerability they engender. “Skin” was an aluminum cylinder, the fuselage of a Boeing 737 that emerges from the gallery floor, stopped in the act of flying. “Control” was composed of panels, roughly modeled on those used in Chernobyl, that wend their way through the gallery.Catalogue is available.Commissioned by Location One.

Victoria Vesna: Nano Mandala

15 Dec 2004 – 29 Jan 2005
An installation by media artist Victoria Vesna, with nanoscience pioneer James Gimzewski. It consisted of a video projected onto a disk of sand, 8 feet in diameter. Visitors could touch the sand as images were projected in evolving scale from the molecular structure of a single grain of sand to the recognizable image of the complete mandala, and then back again. This coming together of art, science and technology is a modern interpretation of an ancient tradition that consecrates the planet and its inhabitants to bring about purification and healing. The sand mandala seen in this installation was created by Tibetan Buddhist monks from the Gaden Lhopa Khangtsen Monastery in India. Sound artist Anne Niemetz developed the soundscape derived from sounds recorded during the creative process of making the sand mandala.

Group Exhibition: Creative Intelligence

20 – 27 May 2004
New work from the MIT Visual Arts Program featuring work by Carrie Bodle, Ross Cisneros, Clementine Cummer, Lukasz Lysakowski, and Hiroharu Mori.

Muntadas: On Translation: On View

30 Mar – 15 May 2004
On View, a new work from the On Translation Series, conceived and shot in Japan, post-produced in New York at Location One, is about viewing, looking… waiting… as contemporary rituals. “On Translation”, a series of work begun in Helsinki in 1995, groups a set of thirty works reflecting on the concept of translation and interpretation from a perspective that encompasses cultural, linguistic, political and economic issues produced and presented in different contexts and mediums.

Claude Closky: Television

12 Sep – 30 Dec 2003
Curated by Nathalie Anglès
The first US solo installation by French artist Claude Closky. Television focused on the production of signs and systems that articulate the world in a society driven by consumerism. Television was a caricatured reflection of the web and television networks that questioned their rapid and continuous growth, regardless of the information they broadcast. Sponsored by Location One. This exhibition was made possible through the generous additional support of Étant donnés, The French-American Fund for Contemporary Art; Cultural Services of the French Embassy (US); and DICREAM-CNC, Ministère de la Culture et de la Communication, France.

Gozo Yoshimasu: Poetic Spectrum: Images, Objects and Words of Gozo Yoshimasu

3-23 Sep 2003
The New York debut exhibition and special performance reading by renowned Japanese poet Gozo Yoshimasu, recent recipient of the Purple Ribbon Award from the Japanese Government for his significant cultural contributions. “Poetic Spectrum” presented Yoshimasu’s photographs and copperplate calligraphies for the first time to a New York audience, and brought the legendary poet to New York to perform after a ten-year absence. Sponsored by Location One with generous support from The Japan Foundation.

Saoirse Higgins & Simon Schiessl: Mechanism No. 1: War & The Doom_Machine

9 Jul – 2 Aug 2003
Two new interactive works by Saoirse Higgins and Simon Schiessl addressing our concerns and fears in the world as we embrace technology and its powers, both good and bad. “Mechanism No. 1″ is an interactive video projection examining the critical moments leading to war. “The Doom_Machine” takes a daily measure of how close we are to a possible end to the world via related sites on the Internet and a doom voting website.Sponsored by Location One.

Group Exhibition: Signal to Noise

10 Sep – 19 Oct 2002
Curated by Heather Wagner A group exhibition featuring works that explored the relationship of sound and light waves. Not merely illustrations of audio-visual synaesthesia, several of the pieces act literally as transducers, that is, devices that convert input energy of one form into output energy of another. Work exhibited by Atsushi Nishijima, Erwin Redl, Laurie Spiegel, and Heather Wagner.Sponsored by Location One.

Xu Tan: Qing Hua Porcelain (Blue & White)

29 May – 29 Jun 2002
Xu Tan’s debut solo exhibition in New York City. “Qing Hua Porcelain (Blue & White)” was a new video/sound installation in which Xu Tan explored the differences in American and Chinese cultural interpretations of what is “real” and what is “fake”. Although each culture distinguishes and classifies “real” from “fake”, neither clearly defines these terms.Commissioned by Location One.

François Bucher: White Balance (to think is to forget differences)

10 Jan-2 Mar 2002
“White Balance (to think is to forget differences)” by Columbian artist François Bucher, is a meditation after 9-11 and an effort to uncover the geographies of power, the frontiers of privilege. It revisits this problem from different angles, creating short circuits of meaning which are hosted by improbable audiovisual matches. Media and internet footage is intermixed with images shot in downtown Manhattan before and after the September 11th attacks.Underwritten by Location One.Additional funding was provided by The New York City Media Arts Grant of The Jerome Foundation.

Keith Sonnier: O2 = O3; Fractured Oxygen = Ozone

20 Sep – 28 Nov 2001
Exhibition by internationally celebrated artist Keith Sonnier comprised of six pieces that resulted from Sonnier’s investigations into the work of Nikola Tesla during the period 1990-1997.The Tesla series “captures” raw electricity in its most spectacular form by stringing copper wires and causing the current to flow and spark between them.Sponsored by Location One.

Inagural Exhibition: Life After the Squirrel

9 Sep-8 Oct 2000
Location One’s first exhibition featured many European and American artists including Janet Cardiff, Mason Cooley, Filipe Miguel, Aernout Mik, John Neff, Vincent Pruden, relax (Marie-Antoinette Chiarenza, Daniel Hauser, Daniel Croptier), Pipilotti Rist, Ugo Rondinone, Greg Simsic, Kirsten Stoltman, Tony Tasset and Pia Wergius. Sponsored by Location One with additional generous support by The Mondriaan Foundation.

Project Gallery Events & Exhibitions

irp — Fri, 18 May 2007 16:58:00 +0000

SELECTED PAST EXHIBITIONS:

Main Gallery Exhibitions>>

Rudy Shepherd: Portraits

July 8-31, 2009
In “Portraits,” American Artist-in-Residence Rudy Shepherd presents a series of recent works that challenge and transcend traditional notions of who and what is a worthy subject of high-art portraiture, e.g., criminals, anonymous Taliban members, black heroes, or houses.The painted portraits in Shepherd’s “Criminal/Victim” series from 2009 depict both perpetrators and victims of the same crime side-by-side, visually blurring the line between innocence and guilt. By presenting the people first and the stories second a space is created for humanity to be re-instilled into the lives of people who have been reduced to mere headlines by the popular press (e.g. Timothy McVeigh).

Nicolas Grospierre & Kaeko Mizukoshi: Safe and Hymn.

Rob Kennedy: I Relish Your Balderdash

June 25th, 2008
A video screening of Hapless, Helpless and Hopeless, by Rob Kennedy and Peter Dowling, 2008, (34 mins), with film screenings of Secondary Currents (1983, 17 mins) and The Gift (1994, 6 mins), by Peter Rose plus spoken texts, sounds and other paraphernaliaA screening/talk/reading presented by Rob Kennedy and Peter Rose concerning the absurdities, problems and possibilities of language, as affected by image, text, time, sense and nonsense.

Rashaad Newsome: Compositions

June 19 – July 26 2008
Have pop culture and globalization co-opted the wonderfully expressive gestures of the black America female? This is the question that Rashaad Newsome explores in video and photography in Shade Compositions, one of two new works in an exhibition opening on Thursday June 19th at Location One.

Daniel Andersson & Tseng Yu-chin: IRP Exhibition 2008

June 4-18, 2008
Location One is pleased to present new work by Daniel Andersson (Finland) and by Tseng Yu-chin (Taiwan), participants of the International Residency Program this year. The exhibited work was made at Location One as part of their residency and features multi-layered ink photographs and drawings.

Eric Siu & Luis Nobre

May 21, 2008
Optical Handlers – eeyee is a new interactive media project that consists of an optical goggle device constructed by the artist, which splits the vision into four channels. Hold It! is an installation that creates a fantastical, sometimes hallucinatory vision of nature, the city and the artist’s studio. Visual play is generated by overlapping layers of drawings, ephemeral sculptures made of paper and cardboard, light wire objects, all constructed by Nobre in-situ.

Nina Sobell: Internal Message Search – A Performative Installation

April 18-April 30, 2008
Nina Sobell will install her studio in Location One’s Project Gallery, which includes recent wax
sculptures, drawings, keyboard, guitar and mic.
Visitors to the gallery will be able to engage in a dialogue with the artist about this work, and may bring their own instruments to improvise with her live on the web.

Hermelinde Hergenhahn & Mafalda Santos: In the Location One Project Space

January 30th -February 9th, 2008
Hergenhahn’s installation will consist of a series of pencil drawings gathered from experiences of quotidian life, and a video projection and wall etching in the gallery. Santos plays with the architecture of the exhibition space to reflect on the particular conditions of being an artist temporarily displaced from her customary work space, while she also considers the evolution of her work in a hand-drawn map for a new website.

Hung Nguyen Manh: Special Sound Performance

Jan 11th, 2008, 7pm
“From Cricket to Airplane”, an experimental performance by Hung Nguyen Manh followed by 2 other short pieces. 3 solo pieces that transports the audience into hi-frequency (cricket) to lo-frequency (airplane) sound effects. Realized with an electric guitar, e-bow and effects Boss DS1 + PS5 + DD6.

Hung Nguyen Manh & Moira Ricci: In Location One’s Project Space

9th -19th January 2008
Central to Moira Ricci’s work is the world of the family home as the natural arena in which relationships are played out. Putting aside her own emotions, Ricci turns her personal narrative into fertile ground for thinking about the world we live in.

Katia Kameli & Kuba Bakowski: In Location One’s Project Space

December 13-22, 2007
With “Draft“, Katia Kameli continues her investigation into key issues that drive her film, video and installation practice, namely the construction of intersecting identities in a globalized world, hybridization, the notion of intercultural spaces and awareness of psychogeographical effects.

Nine International Artists Exhibit

June 2nd – July 28th, 2007
Location One presents the second IRP group show of the 2006-2007 season, featuring new work developed by our resident artists. The exhibition represents a diverse range of artistic approaches and many are works in progress.

Jeanette Doyle: StarLine Tours

April 13-May 25, 2007
Jeanette Doyle’s practice is primarily concerned with picture making. She is particularly interested in painting and its relationship to lens-based technologies. Her work is driven by conceptual concerns but is deeply engaged with the processes and mechanics of making, especially the production of images. Her works express a desire to crystalise complexity for a moment in an image which, on closer inspection, allows the fiction of coherence to dissolve. Disjunction between the image and text is a hint of this. This disjunction between word and image is a feature of the ‘StarLine Tours’ exhibition at Location One.

IRP Exhibition, Winter 2007

February 13-March 31st, 2007
Featuring: Natalie Bewernitz & Marek Goldowski, Teresa Henriques, Agnieszka Kalinowska,
Nina Katchadourian, Rie Kawakami, Alessandro Nassiri, Kaori Tazoe, Virginie Yassef
Location One presents the first of two exhibitions showcasing new work developed during their residencies by eight artists participating in the 2006-2007 International Residency Program. Featured works, some of which are exhibited as work-in-progress, represent a diverse range of artistic approaches.

Leesa & Nicole Abahuni: In the Sky

November 21, 2006 – January 27, 2007
An opening reception and performance will be held on Wednesday, November 29th from 6 to 8 pm.
The multimedia installation, which was commissioned by Location One, is entitled In the Sky, is an exploration into the sharing of the senses and the interconnectedness between perception and sensation as experienced through visual, aural, and physical realms.

International Residency Program 2005-2006 – Group Show II

June 1st – July 29th, 2006
Featuring: Leesa & Nicole Abahuni, Simo Alitalo, Andrew Duggan, Mayumi Nakazaki, Trine Nedreaas, Yuki Okumura, Lydia Venieri, Wang Ya-Hui.
On Thursday, June 1st, Location One opens its Summer exhibition, showcasing new work developed by resident artists from the USA, Finland, Ireland, The Netherlands, Norway, Japan, Greece, and Taiwan who are participating in the Location One 2005-2006 International Residency Program. The show will be open to the public through Saturday, July 29th, 2006.

Andrew Duggan: ECHO

Thursday, May 18, 2006 – 6:30-8:30pm
Location One presents ECHO, a collaborative project created by visual/media artist Andrew Duggan and dancers Jonathan Kelliher and Joanne Barry of Siamsa Tíre, the National Folk Theatre of Ireland. For one-night only traditional Irish dance will be transported from the South West coast of Ireland to Location One’s Gallery space in New York City. Impromptu street performances and filming will take place in NYC at undisclosed locations leading up to the event. The resulting project will be presented at Location One.

International Residency Program 2005-2006 – Group Show I

February 9th – March 4th, 2006
Featuring: Paololuca Barbieri, Isabelle Ferreira, Geka Heinke, Yoon-Young Park, Mariana Viegas.
On Thursday, February 9th, Location One presents the first of two Spring exhibitions showcasing new work developed by artists from Italy, France, Germany, Korea, and Portugal who are participating in the 2005-2006 International Residency Program. Featured works represent a diverse range of artistic approaches.

Paololuca Barbieri and art collective, ALTERAZIONI VIDEO: LIGHT WAVES live in NEW YORK

Wednesday February 15th – 7:00 PM
A concert-performance conceived as a one-night audio-video event. The project explores the relationship between light and sound, looking for the natural correspondence between these two elements, between visible and invisible, playing with their frequencies.

Martin Beauregard: Somnambulic

7 December 2005 – 4 February 2006
Location One is pleased to present Somnambulic, the first New York solo exhibition by Canadian artist Martin Beauregard. This new body of work highlights persistent themes for the artist revolving around the relation between dream, illusion, and reality. It also produces a “fantastical strangeness” that is characteristic of Beauregard’s work, as he explores modes of perception through play and creation.

Yumiko Furukawa, Kenny Hunter, Wu Ta-Kun, and Mariana Viegas: IRP Exhibition Spring 2005 III

June 4th – July 30th, 2005
Tent for Poet (2005) (multimedia installation with tent, furnishings, video & DVD) is a work dedicated by the artist to a poet living in New York. Citizen Firefighter (2001) (resin sculpture), was conceived primarily to celebrate the men and women of Strathclyde Brigade in Scotland. The driving force behind Wu Ta-Kun’s varied body of work is expanding “ideas of sensibility”. Landscape is an entity –or a body– which is transformed by our presence and which, in turn, transforms us.

Martin Beauregard & Marlena Kudlicka: IRP Exhibition Spring 2005 II

April 28th – May 28th, 2005
Location One is pleased to present the second of three Spring exhibitions showcasing the work of artists participating in its 2004-2005 International Residency Program. The two installations by Canadian artist Martin Beauregard, and Polish artist Marlena Kudlicka were developed during their residencies at Location One.

Nayda Collazo-Llorens and Santeri Tuori: IRP Exhibition Spring 2005

March 18 – April 23, 2005
Artists-in-Residence Nayda Collazo-Llorens (USA) and Santeri Tuori (Finland) will present video installations in Location One’s main gallery. With special thanks to NYSCA (New York State Council on the Arts) and FRAME (Finnish Fund for Art Exchange)

Cécile Paris: 3 videos and 3 songs

Dec 15 2004 – Jan 29, 2005
Each video presents a singular character performing a simple action: a figure on a skateboard filmed from the back in a car, a young girl playing guitar on a traffic circle in the suburbs of Paris, a swimmer, a New York doorman as he progresses through the city at night.

Mark Themann: PASSED for EXPORT: an installation.

July 8 – July 31, 2004
PASSED for EXPORT, a site-specific installation by Mark Themann, raises questions about the American Landscape, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights in times of political crisis. Two videos of monumental US landscapes are projected in unnervingly slow and steady takes on opposite walls. Any potential romanticism is forestalled by the cacophonous clashing of two audio tracks in which the narrators are each reading from the Amendments to the Bill of Rights and the Constitution, reciting with an extreme stutter.

IRP Exhibition 2004

May 28 – June 30, 2004
Featuring:Koki Tanaka, Hsiao Sheng Chien, Mark Themann, Federico Muelas, Miguel Soares, Alexandra do Carmo, Vincent Lamouroux.
On Thursday, May 27, Location One presents its third annual artist-in-residence group exhibition. Eight works ranging from video, to sculpture, to robotic structures, to interactive installations were developed by emerging international artists during their stay. Featured in the main gallery, the show will be open to the public through Wednesday, June 30th, 2004.

Kurt Ralske: Re-Mapping 4 Dimensions: Three New Works

January-February, 2004
These three works explore time, and our perception of time. For me, one of the most interesting qualities of video is that it is in reality only a collection of still images. At 30 video frames per second, any 10 seconds of fluid movement can alternately be considered as a static collection of 300 related still images. Working in the digital realm in a real-time manner, there are endless possibilies for instantly treating a new video recording as a library of stills, then deriving new material by analyzing or modifying this library: reordering entries, comparing similarity or difference between entries, deriving a single image from multiple entries, etc.

Vesna Pavlovic: Casual Friday

December 10-30, 2003
Casual Friday will consist of several layers, only one of which will be photographic. Audio interviews, drawings and writings will constitute the other layers.
Collaborator and architect Srdjan Weiss, will address these themes through drawings of the layout and contents of the “perfect” office. He will do so through drawings, and will integrate into his work research on the history of the subject building, as well as information related to the taste and design of the architects who originally worked on the building.

Miguel Soares: Red Alert

November-December, 2003
“Do androids dream of electric sheep?” – Philip K. Dick
Gustavo is a robot that has been discarded in a black garbage bag. Out of this bag extends Gustavo’s motorized arm, with a laser that is carving a drawing on the wall. Do robots dream of being artists?

Saoirse Higgins and Simon Schiessl: Mechanism no.1: War

July 9 – August 2, 2003
This is an interactive video projection examining the critical moments leading to war. The visitor winds* up the mechanical toy drummer boy with the brass key. The action of the drummer boy correlates to a projected video that shows bombs dropping from the sky. The sound of the bombs keeps exact beat with the drum. The tighter the mechanism is wound the faster the bombs will drop. The visitor controls frequency of the bombing. Where are these bombs being dropped? What are the consequences?

Daniel Blaufuks, Isabelle Jenniches, Dominik Lejman, Javier Viver, and Jiun-Ting Lin: IRP Exhibition 2003

May 22, 2003-June 28, 2003
May 22, Location One, a not-for-profit multimedia arts organization, opened its second artist-in-residence group exhibition with multimedia work developed during their stay. Included artists: Daniel Blaufuks (Portugal), Isabelle Jenniches (The Netherlands), Dominik Lejman (Poland), Jiun-Ting Lin (Taiwan), and Javier Viver (Spain). This exhibition will be on view in Location One’s gallery through June 28, 2003 and will be streamed live on our website (www.location1.org).

Atsushi Nishijima, Erwin Redl, Laurie Spiegel and Heather Wagner: Signal to Noise

September 10 – October 19, 2002
Location One is happy to present “Signal to Noise“, a group exhibition featuring works that explore the relationship of sound and light waves. Not merely illustrations of audio-visual synaesthesia, several of the pieces act literally as transducers, that is, devices that convert input energy of one form into output energy of another.

Xu Tan: Qing Hua Porcelain (Blue & White)

May 23rd – June 29th 2002
Xu Tan draws his inspiration from the teachings of philosopher Chuang-Tzu (circa 250 BC). Successor to Lao Tzu and a foremost proponent of Taoism, Chuang-Tzu presumed that no matter how alike two things are, a difference between them can always be found and, conversely, no matter how different two things are, one can find a similarity between them. Objective similarities and differences do not justify any particular way of distinguishing between things.

Francois Bucher: White Balance

January 10 – March 2, 2002
White Balance (to think is to forget differences) is an effort to uncover the geographies of power, the frontiers of privilege. It revisits this problem from different angles, creating short circuits of meaning which are hosted by improbable audiovisual matches. Media and internet footage is intermixed with images shot in downtown Manhattan before and after the September 11th attacks.

Atsushi Nishijima: Subtractive Creation/Visible Sound

December 8th – 29, 2001
“Sound does not exist without space and space is always filled with sound. Space represents sound as something visible, sound represents space as something audible. Our daily life is made of inevitable factors such as time and space. As for myself, that is a place where contemporary music exists.” –Atsushi Nishijima

François Bucher, Marta Deskur, and Ksenija Turcic: Irp Exhibition 2001

June 9-July 28, 2001
Museum of Mankind is a video installation depicting the statues that stand high on the roof of the Museum of Mankind in London. In a multimedia installation and web site project, New Baby?, Marta Deskur questions the significance of family today and the conflicting issues this question addresses. Ksenija Turcic presents a new multimedia installation, Phase, where she pursues her investigation of emotional space.

Katya Sander and François Bucher: RECORDERS

March 22 – April 21, 2001
“Recorders is an installation where a rotating camera and video projector interact with the visitor in a game of shadows and projection, images and text, narration and space, focus and blur. A pre-recorded conversation acts as voice-over for the entire set-up which is encompassed by a large image that resembles something like bits of information, white noise or a glittery seascape.

Project Gallery Events & Exhibitions

admin — Fri, 18 May 2007 16:58:00 +0000

SELECTED PAST EXHIBITIONS:

Main Gallery Exhibitions>>

Rudy Shepherd: Portraits

Nicolas Grospierre & Kaeko Mizukoshi: Safe and Hymn.

Rob Kennedy: I Relish Your Balderdash

Rashaad Newsome: Compositions

Daniel Andersson & Tseng Yu-chin: IRP Exhibition 2008

Eric Siu & Luis Nobre

Nina Sobell: Internal Message Search – A Performative Installation

Hermelinde Hergenhahn & Mafalda Santos: In the Location One Project Space

Hung Nguyen Manh: Special Sound Performance

Hung Nguyen Manh & Moira Ricci: In Location One’s Project Space

Katia Kameli & Kuba Bakowski: In Location One’s Project Space

Nine International Artists Exhibit

Jeanette Doyle: StarLine Tours

IRP Exhibition, Winter 2007

Leesa & Nicole Abahuni: In the Sky

International Residency Program 2005-2006 – Group Show II

Andrew Duggan: ECHO

International Residency Program 2005-2006 – Group Show I

Paololuca Barbieri and art collective, ALTERAZIONI VIDEO: LIGHT WAVES live in NEW YORK

Martin Beauregard: Somnambulic

Yumiko Furukawa, Kenny Hunter, Wu Ta-Kun, and Mariana Viegas: IRP Exhibition Spring 2005 III

Martin Beauregard & Marlena Kudlicka: IRP Exhibition Spring 2005 II

Nayda Collazo-Llorens and Santeri Tuori: IRP Exhibition Spring 2005

Cécile Paris: 3 videos and 3 songs

Mark Themann: PASSED for EXPORT: an installation.

IRP Exhibition 2004

Kurt Ralske: Re-Mapping 4 Dimensions: Three New Works

Vesna Pavlovic: Casual Friday

Miguel Soares: Red Alert

Saoirse Higgins and Simon Schiessl: Mechanism no.1: War

Daniel Blaufuks, Isabelle Jenniches, Dominik Lejman, Javier Viver, and Jiun-Ting Lin: IRP Exhibition 2003

Atsushi Nishijima, Erwin Redl, Laurie Spiegel and Heather Wagner: Signal to Noise

Xu Tan: Qing Hua Porcelain (Blue & White)

Francois Bucher: White Balance

Atsushi Nishijima: Subtractive Creation/Visible Sound

François Bucher, Marta Deskur, and Ksenija Turcic: Irp Exhibition 2001

Katya Sander and François Bucher: RECORDERS

OHW with Pierre-Lin Renié and Allan McCollum

admin — Wed, 21 Feb 2007 05:01:04 +0000

February 21, 2007ARTISTS and IMAGESReproduction as a Creative Principlepresentation and discussion withPierre-Lin Renié and Allan McCollumWednesday 21 February 20077 pmStarting with the explosion of photographic reproduction in the 1850’s and moving through the 20th century when reproduction became a creative principle for many artists (from Duchamp to Gonzalez-Torres), Pierre-Lin Renié will explore issues revolving around the ways in which art is produced, publicized, traded and consumed, especially as it pertains to new media. Alan McCollum will present some of his latest projects and talk about image reproduction in his own work.A discussion will follow.Pierre-Lin Renié is curator in charge of the Musée Goupil (Bordeaux, France), a museum devoted to art publishing in the 19th century, and which holds the collection of the art publisher Goupil. He also teaches at the art school in Bordeaux. He was a fellow at the Clark Art Institute (2002) and at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (2004). He curated many shows, including the traveling exhibition Gérôme & Goupil: Art and Enterprise (2000-2001). He published several studies on prints and photographs in the 19th century, especially about the various issues connected with the phenomenon of the mass-produced reproduction of works of art in the 19th century. He also published essays on several contemporary artists, one of his other fields of interest.American artist Allan McCollum has spent over thirty years exploring how objects achieve public and personal meaning in a world constituted in mass production. In 1975 his work was included in the Whitney Biennial, and he moved to New York City that same year. In the late seventies he became especially well known for his series, Surrogate Paintings.McCollum has had over 100 solo exhibitions, including retrospectives in several European museums. He participated in the Aperto at the 1988 Venice Biennale, and his works are held in nearly seventy art museum collections worldwide, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Somnambulic – Martin Beauregard

irp — Mon, 05 Dec 2005 17:28:15 +0000

Recent sculpture, videos and photographs by Martin Beauregard
7 December 2005 – 4 February 2006
Opening reception: Tuesday December 6th, 6-8 pm
Exhibition open: through Saturday, February 4th (Tue-Sat, 12-6 pm)

Location One is pleased to present Somnambulic, the first New York solo exhibition by Canadian artist Martin Beauregard. This new body of work highlights persistent themes for the artist revolving around the relation between dream, illusion, and reality. It also produces a “fantastical strangeness” that is characteristic of Beauregard’s work, as he explores modes of perception through play and creation.

Featured works trigger a poetical and deliberate confusion between cuddly toys and dead animals, between play-acting and deadly hunting rites. Confronting the world of childhood fantasy and the harsh brutality of game hunting causes a shift in meaning, a displacement of signs and symbols that create unsettling tension.

Wake Up Teddy! is a giant stuffed toy whose fur is made from the real skin of a bear: reality and fiction coming together in one object. Jewel in the Head shows a trophy-like moose whose horns have been plated in silver, namely the materialization of the symbol of victory. These works mirror the double nature of each individual’s perception of reality

The hunting theme carries over to the series of photographs entitled Old Boys that show groups of hunters proudly displaying their “kill” in a dreamlike, eerie and ghostly atmosphere.

The exhibition also includes video projections of past performance pieces and the more recent Lotus (3 minute video loop), a visual poem through which the artist contemplates the connection between the physical world and the sublime/absolute.

[Show as slideshow]

Martin Beauregard studied at the l’Université du Québec at Abitibi-Témiscamingue. He also received the Diplôme National Supérieur from the École des Beaux-Arts in Bordeaux . Since 2000 his work has been featured in solo shows in his native country and in numerous group shows in France, Canada and the U.S. In 2004-2005 he participated in Location One’s International Residency Program.

On Wednesday, December 7th at 7pm there will be an Artist Talk featuring a conversation between Martin Beauregard and Nathalie Anglés, Director of Location One’s International Residency Program. This event is free and open to the public.

Location One thanks the Cultural Services of the Quebec Government House, the Canada Council for the Arts for their support of this exhibition.

Victoria Vesna – Nano Mandala

admin — Wed, 15 Dec 2004 21:19:51 +0000

December 16th, 2004 – January 29th 2005

by Victoria Vesna with nanoscience pioneer James Gimzewski

December 16th, 2004 – January 29th 2005

Opening: Wednesday, December 15, 2004, 6-8 pm
Exhibition: December 16, 2004 through January 29, 2005

To salute World Peace in this Holiday Season, Location One presents an installation by media artist Victoria Vesna, in collaboration with nanoscience pioneer James Gimzewski.

The installation consists of a video projected onto a disk of sand, 8 feet in diameter. Visitors can touch the sand as images are projected in evolving scale from the molecularstructure of a single grain of sand—achieved my means of a scanning tunneling microscope (STM)—to the recognizable image of the complete mandala, and then back again. This coming together of art, science and technology is a modern interpretation of an ancient tradition that consecrates the planet and its inhabitants to bring about purification and healing.

The sand mandala of Chakrasamvara seen in this installation was created by Tibetan Buddhist monks from the Gaden Lhopa Khangtsen Monastery in India, in conjunction with the “Circle of Bliss” exhibition on Nepalese and Tibetan Buddhist Art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. This particular sand mandala had never before been made in the United States.

To complement the video, sound artist Anne Niemetz has developed a meditative soundscape derived from sounds recorded during the creative process of making the sand mandala.

Of the installation the artist says: “Inspired by watching the nanoscientist at work, purposefully arranging atoms just as the monk laboriously creates sand images grain by grain, this work brings together the Eastern and Western minds through their shared process centered on patience. Both cultures use these bottom-up building practices to create a complex picture of the world from extremely different perspectives.”

With generous support from the David W. Bermant Foundation.

dorkbot-nyc 2004-05-05

admin — Wed, 05 May 2004 05:01:02 +0000

May 5, 2004

Location One is happy to host this month’s dorkbot-nyc meeting—a monthly gathering of artists (sound/image/movement/whatever), designers, engineers, students and other interested parties who are involved in the creation of electronic art (in the broadest sense of the term.)

Hosted by, and usually taking place at the Columbia University Computer Music Center (CMC), dorkbot-nyc meetings are coordinated by Douglas Irving Repetto.

featuring the lovely and talented:

Spot Draves: Electric Sheep
Electric Sheep is a distributed screen-saver that harnesses idle computers into a render farm with the purpose of animating and evolving artificial life-forms. Each clip of animation has a genetic code, and the collective voting of users determines its fitness. In the next version, a P2P network distributes the bandwidth for sharing the video and votes.
http://electricsheep.org

Rich LeGrand: Gameboy Hacks
The Gameboy Advance is famous for its ability to play games, but Nintendo has unwittingly put together a great embedded computer system that’s cheap and powerful. When using standard (and free) C compilers and a little extra hardware, you can program the Gameboy to do all sorts of cool stuff such as control motors, read sensors, talk, display graphics or simply run your code. In other words, screw Mario.
http://www.charmedlabs.com

Rob Seward: GTTM Analysis Software
The Generative Theory of Tonal Music (GTTM) was developed in the early 80s by composer Fred Lerdahl and linguist Ray Jackendoff. GTTM “relates the aural surface of a piece to the musical structure unconsciously inferred by the experienced listener” (Lerdahl and Jackendoff, 1983, book jacket). Working closely with Fred Lerdahl and with funding from the Keck Foundation, we have written software that performs a GTTM analysis on pieces written in the style of a Bach chorale. The software uses a unique user interface to display the “unconscious musical structures” that can be found in a piece. It also performs a complete Roman numeral analysis. In the process of automating the analysis, we revised elements of GTTM itself and developed a new key-finding algorithm. We have also created a unique compositional tool. If one wishes to make modifications to a chorale piece, they can immediately see the structural consequences of a revision. Eventually, we will create software that can work with music beyond the Bach chorale style.

Winter Music Series: Mark Dresser

admin — Thu, 14 Feb 2002 05:01:23 +0000

February 14, 2002 + Friday February 15, 2002

Mark Dresser Modular Ensemble
a music performance curated by Ned Rothenburg

Mark Dresser & Marcus Weiss Duo

8:00 PM Each night
$10 admission – Members Free

Mark Dresser Modular Ensemble Composer and bassist Mark Dresser will present an evening of his compositions including the U.S. Premier of “Althaus” for an ensemble of virtuoso musicians from Switzerland including tuba soloist, David LeClair with Marcus Weiss (alto sax), Regula Schneider (clarinet), Stefania’ Verita’ (cello) and New York bassist, Mark Dresser.

“Althaus” is written for tuba virtuoso David LeClair and a mixed ensemble of reeds and strings. It was recorded on Mark Dresser’s 2000 Tzadik release, “Marinade”. This “tuba-fest” has Mr. LeClair as featured soloist in a work that integrates composition and improvisation, mining rich “new” sounds, catchy grooves, a long evolving melody, and a singing chorale. Also featured will be “Quartet for Trio” with Matthias Ziegler (flutes), Regula Scheneider (voice and clarinet) and bassist Dresser. There will also be a world premier of a sextet composed by saxophonist, Marcus Weiss.

Mark Dresser & Marcus Weiss Duo
Swiss virtuoso saxophonist Marcus Weiss, a champion of contemporary music performance, and the New York bass virtuoso and composer Mark Dresser will present an evening of compositions, structured improvisations and solo pieces. In the last ten years Marcus Weiss has premiered more than a hundred works for solo saxophone, chamber music and saxophone concertos. Such composers as Georges Aperghis, John Cage, Helmut Lachenmann, Salvatore Sciarrino, Vinko Globokar, Hanspeter Kyburz, Manuel Hidalgo, Jô Kôndô, Elliott Sharp, Brice Pauset, Stefano Gervasoni, Mauricio Sotelo and others have composed for him.

Atsushi Nishijima with Yuzo Sakuraomoto

irp — Wed, 06 Feb 2002 16:29:19 +0000

Click here to view the embedded video.

Transcript:

(this interview was conducted in Japanese on February 9 2002).

YUKO SAKURAMOTO: I’m with Atsushi Nishijima. Atsushi is a sound artist from Kyoto, Japan. His work and activities are diverse, including sound installation, he live performance, and research on soundscape. He just made an installation at Location One in New York.

So, first please tell us about your installation at Location One :

ATSUSHI NISHIJIMA: I used TV monitors, video tapes, and solar batteries to design the sound system for the installation. For the video screening, I used two different types of sequences: one features images of natural glimmering from the sun and the moon, the other consists of a man-made rhythm resulting from evolving neon signs and the cityscape that I shot at Times Square. Sound was produced by the changing lights, and on screen, color and movement were transformed into electric signals through the use of solar batteries.

YS: Your exhibition was titled, “Subtractive Creation.” Could you explain the meaning of ‘subtractive creation’ , and tell us how you came up with the idea?

AN: Usually, when I think of an idea, I tend to think of different kinds of things by analogy. For instance, in the case of sound and light, they are interesting to me because they are both wave forms. We perceive colors when the waves within the sunlight or streetlights are reflected on things, so that the waves that could be seen red or blue out of all the spectrum of light only reach our eyes. In other words, we simply receive something that is subtracted from some existent totality. In this sense, I am interested in the relationship of the totality, a thing as its part, and myself, and how they interact with each other. Using the earlier example, rather than mixing or adding ‘red’ and ‘blue’ to create something, my concern is how something can be subtracted, mediated by my work, and what the outcome will look like.

YS: So-called “Sound Art” has been gaining popularity recently. As new technology or the computer software has become more available, it seems that everyone can become musicians. What is your definition of Sound Art?

AN: As for the technology, I don’t make any distinction between high and low technology. A friend of mine told me that some people still use the terms ‘new media’ and ‘old media’ for categorization. For me, it seems to be a matter of methodology or choice. Some people use a digital camera, and others opt for a traditional camera with photographic film. Rather than claiming which is good or bad, new or old, it’s becoming more like a matter of one’s taste. The question is how to utilize them, how to use the media ! I heard an interesting story concerning the invention of Hovercrafts. A group of ship specialists started the project in an attempt to produce a high-speed vehicle on the water. They first tried to elaborate the design of the hull, improve the screws, the engine and so on, but failed in their attempts. At some point a specialist on aviation technology joined the team that was working on this project and proposed to create a “flying ship”, which is neither a ship nor an airplane. Ship specialists couldn’t even conceive of such an idea. They were only concerned with the idea of updating the qualities of the ship, and could not imagine a ship hovering in the air. I found the story really interesting. I titled my installation at Location One, “Subtractive Creation” in a rather symbolic sense, as opposed to the idea of creation by addition or mixing. I don’t think adding or mixing is enough. You need to reach a completely different idea in order to create something interesting and new. Unless you can create different ways of looking or thinking, or produce interesting concepts; if I use the example of the ship, you would end up upgrading its performance, efficiency or comfort level. In my case, although I compose and perform music, I want to present different ways of listening to music through my work, or compose and create in relation to the way in which music is listened to. Proposing new ways of listening and hearing, that is my focus. As for the definition of Sound Art, it’s a difficult question. Generally when the work utilizes sound as a medium, it’s often refered to as “Sound Art”. For me, whether sound is used or not, this is not the issue. What matters is whether the work is conceived from “sound”. As long as it is conceived or designed from the perspective of sound, it can be called “sound art”, regardless of whether it is painting, sculpture, or photography. Because what we refer to as “sound” has various aspects. A good example is a musical instrument. Like, when we think of a box whose volume is identical to the volume of a violin, since the shape is different the box doesn’t produce the same sound as the violin, even though the volume is the same. In other words, shape, material, and volume as components of the instrument, the architectural space or environment in which these components are found, all these elements can relate to sound either as a whole or individually. Either way, since it is related to sound, it has that distinct shape and space. To put it in reverse, whether it’s painting, sculpture, photography or architecture, I think “sound art” has interesting possibilities.