Educate, Enlighten, Engage

Museums in smaller cities and towns, and even small sized museums in larger cities or towns, never cease to amaze me! These places give you a close glimpse into a world you never knew existed,  showing work by locals (in the case of Pennsylvania "locals" include the likes of Andy Warhol & The Brothers Quay!), the collections of locals (from someone's personal unicorn collection to donations from a wealthy person, usually made wealthy by a regional export), presenting traveling exhibitions (an old tradition that has been increasing in popularity, probably because of the obliteration of arts budgets across the globe) and often curated by someone who understands & reflects their specific location. Small museums tend to feel cohesive, informative and personal in a very touching way, even when the galleries are filled with giant ideas that are far from local!

When Brent & I were in Dublin we stumbled on a tiny museum in an old castle crypt dedicated to the history of taxation, a small New York Public Library gallery schooled me on art of the Edo era, a good friend of mine runs the local history collection in an attic exhibition space above a library in southern Vermont -- all little microcosms of someone's vision of a particular subject, informed by research of course but definitely catering to a geographic place and often with a singular person's curatorial idea as opposed to the bureaucracy of major museums. Late last week, as I mentioned before, I headed over to The Reading Public Museum (pictured at top!) in Reading, PA where two exhibits managed to encapsulate huge subjects in the smallest of spaces, skillfully curated to the broadest viewership and acting at opposite ends of the artifice spectrum.


The Prints of Andy Warhol is a traveling exhibit hailing from the (stellar) Warhol Museum of Pittsburgh and everything about it was perfect! The huge array of prints (somehow managing to cover almost every phase in Warhol's printmaking!), the concise yet informative wall text, a darkened room with a few of his (celebrity) Screen Tests (short 16mm b&w silent film portraits from the mid-60s), another small gallery room featuring Silver Clouds (mylar pillow balloons) -- such an all encompassing overview! This exhibit really seemed to be accessible to the widest group of people possible (a range in Reading that consists of the crime favoring to Taylor Swift to art school students), a range that the massive Warhol-ian catalogue, and pop art in general, are probably well suited for! Signs warned against taking pics of the show but...I did manage to snag one of Nico eating a chocolate bar- I couldn't resist! This show is up through June 17th and I heard rumor it is the last stop on the tour so if you happen to be in the Reading area... go see it! Especially so more things like this can come through town!

There were lots of other pieces on view from the museum's collection; there was a small Jim Dine exhibit, a few galleries of world history artifacts, a couple perfectly wondrous Keith Haring pieces (an actual Reading, PA native! pic at bottom), early American landscape oil paintings and things like that but, in a tone opposite of that of the Warhol show,  Theresienstadt's Children and Their Art was also a stark memorable experience. This exhibit featured art made for or by children in the WWII ghetto/concentration camp Theresienstadt in what is now part of the Czech Republic. I am still haunted by an Anne Frank exhibit at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington D.C. that I saw as a kid whose sound design included sudden, intense bursts of barking dog packs on the hunt and the ongoing piercing sounds of shattering glass representing Kristallnacht, but this exhibit was harrowing in it's silence: a simple, small child's scrawl of pencil on paper depicting a cartoon-ish face obscured by barbed wire set beside text relaying the last known train that the child boarded. Other artifacts on display, like a version of the board game Monopoly reclaimed by ghetto inhabitants and handmade marionettes for children's puppet shows (both pictured above), painted a true picture of humanity in a time of ultimate sadness; a culture created to signify hope, art as a means of survival.

When you see a gallery filled with the spirit of life in the face of the most devastating acts of humanity while another nearby gallery is full of images of iconic pop celebrity idolatry it can really make you see the basic need for every kind of art: propelling people forward in every way possible, an agenda that I think is at the heart of every little out-of-the-way museum in the world! My recommendation is to put your location into google maps and search "museum," I don't know what you will find but chances are something will turn up, something that might possibly be a memorable eye opening learning experience that will, in the words of the Reading Public Museum, educate, enlighten and engage!

Art in the Park

When you live in rural Pennsylvania and you regularly pass a billboard for a contest in which you will win "A Free Handgun!" and then you one day mysteriously pass a nearby billboard that says "The Prints of Andy Warhol" with little else than a big purple square and the name of a museum...one gets intrigued. Then you find out that the little museum mentioned on the billboard, The Reading Public Museum, exists in acres of park, along with a planetarium (where I WILL live out my Pink Floyd laser light show dream!) on lush well manicured grounds it makes you start to remember that there are all kinds of ways to look at art and strolling along a babbling brook with mallards in the parking lot beats a lot of the over crowded, mob mentality major-city mega-museums we've become accustomed to.

This "Museum in Park" model is one that I have seen a lot of throughout my US travels: The Brooks Museum in Memphis, Tennessee boasts of a zoo and a bandshell on its grounds, the IMA in Indianapolis has tons of land dotted with fountains and an outdoor amphitheater that they are desperately (and successfully!) trying to curate into shows, The Art Institute of Chicago and the Albright Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, NY also are set aside parks both originally intended as part of world's fair pavilions. Almost all of these museums were constructed at the beginning of the 20th Century, or the close of the 19th, and I really wonder what caused this push towards cultural & land preservation?

There was probably the Roosevelt factor as Teddy spearheaded the National Parks system, his tactics inspiring conservation in all aspects of the nation. Then there was the increase in media, film and photography made distinctly modern American culture broadcast and admired throughout the globe creating culture into a new kind of commodity that the country felt the need to protect/support. Increasing industrialization most likely opened up money for these types of legacy projects...and maybe the rise in smokestacks had something to do with the decision to put these museums in pastoral settings. All of these reasons are so similar to our current climate (environmental concern, faster information exchange, the divide of the super-rich) which makes the newest addition to the American Museum roster, Crystal Bridges (an institution celebrating the art of America set atop a river in a rolling Southern Ozrak expanse), make all the more sense...Here are some photos of the grounds of The Reading Public Museum, a nice breath of fresh air that I hope will return as a trend in the new culture landscape, a pleasing setting that I have found myself retreating to the more crowded, and crowd pleasing, the New York museum scene becomes...!

The New Sound

 

I was reading this art show review and I came across a quote from some old art critic/scholar of some sort named Walter Pater, “All art aspires to the condition of music.” I know I am taking it out of context so I don't know his true intended meaning but as The Velvet Underground filled my ears in the Princeton Record Exchange (a used vinyl mecca conveniently located less than a mile from the final home of Albert Einstein!) on a fine Spring day last week I couldn't help but imagine the strong images of Warhol that will forever associate the two in my mind, a simple melody evoking an entire essence of a time and place.



I often forget how much music meant to my own early understanding of art, coming of age during the rise of the lo-fi indie genre that made it all seem possible, every kid with a guitar feeling like Lou Reed's son ready to shape the sound of a fresh DIY era-- the look and ethos of the crafty Etsy culture, a lot of pop-y graffiti and the accessible feel of a newly hacked digital age all obvious responses to the homespun soundtrack of the late 90s/early 00s. I think music is what brought Brent to art too, making his teenage songs into stories, sending his early film demos to rock bands he admired and, like those rock bands, touring around his films to clubs & colleges all over the country. Music informs visual art and art informs music to make a sonic remembrance of a time, in my case of the grunge-y new-punk of an angsty (dwindling) Clinton-era middle class...



The Jeffery Deitch Machine knew the inextricable link of music & art when he would curate  his art party events in New York, bringing in sounds that could contextualize the visual art to form an easily transmittable scene-- the place to be and feel and, ultimately, invest in for the future in the many different ways that means. Music acts as a widespread signifier of a larger cultural voice and I am wondering what the more recent contemporary art movements, and the era in general, will be sonically identified by?




The rampant tagging of highly individualized genres (I just saw the following tags on a friend's band camp page: pop jaunty jealous minty singalong Brooklyn) is causing a fracture in the voice of a generation but maybe it is this very fracture that is the cohesive style-- like the fluxists or dada-ists. Christian Marclay (his music & his clock), Girl Talk, M.I.A., Santigold, Ryan Trecartin's unhinged throbbing what-have-yous, Martha Colburn's flashy filmic moving montages- are all mixes of everything coming at you all at once, a collage of the global open source image & idea library of a new media age (maybe this is what the new aesthetic is all about?). (And looking at it objectively as a political moment, the Bush to Obama transition couldn't be more of a cultural mash up for sure!) It might be early to try and acoustically define a generation by its artistic output but I am totally interested in what will be playing in the dusty record store in the future (...crosses fingers record store will continue to weather time...) and what the time capsuled memories of my brain will recall from the not-so-simple melodies of the information age!

Let Them Eat Cake

The foodie apocalypse has been here for awhile folks, the apex possibly being the imploding of the food festival out in Brooklyn this past weekend whose hype could not survive the realities of feeding mobs of foie gras enthusiasts! The food & the foodie culture has been slowly seeping into art too of course...A few years ago I remember going to a gallery in the Red Hook area of Brooklyn and having a person put a tiny house made out of mouth wash strips in my mouth, photographing the dissolve, a fitting metaphor for the impending housing bubble burst. Another time, I remember going to a gallery show and an art handler offering me TONS of free bananas after covering an entire wall for a Sagmeister show at Deitch Gallery (I almost forgot about this instance! Maybe this is the real reason I like Sagmeister so much?).

Uber-foodie art occurrences are often written up over at Gastronomista (a swanky little cultural food site), the expertly grafted fruit trees of Sam Van Aken will never cease to be stunning, fundraisers taking the forms of dead apple trees in museums (I swear I read about an event where trees were uprooted and strewn in the middle of an art gala to be eaten as they died but I can't find the reference!), and hacked apart human cakes in not one but two (!) instances of recent controversy (the underpaid, undressed Abramovic performance debacle & the poor unknowing Swedish official vs. the terrifying racist cake) are all a few forms of food on display. But as always, when the meaning of the art surpasses a formal trend I tend to like it a whole lot more...especially when it is local ( "Is it local?" , the foodie mantra)!

While strolling through the studio hallways of Goggleworks, an arts complex in nearby Reading PA, today I saw these great food related photographs by the artist Amy Stevens! Her Confections series (partly pictured here), as her website points out, began as a response to turning 30: baking the celebratory cake, exploring the rituals of the cult of Martha Stewart and finding a freedom in making a less than perfect icing. The photos, which at first glance reminded me of a Rolling Stones album cover which then reminded me of the song Mother's Little Helper (an ever so fitting reference!), were so nicely done! Busy crafted backdrops behind grossly luscious or creepily rickety pedestal-ed cakes -- like food porn for psychotic mums-- I loved them! The bright colors to the point of madness made a subversive homemaker feel, a reclaiming of the eerie recipe cards of homemakers past and all of the expectation they represent! Nice one Amy! Now, I'm not sure how permanent the foodie fervor that is upon us is but at least these (meaningful) photographic cakes will live on long after this (extremely delicious looking) $80 cake!

Note: I am not against the foodie movement! Eating responsibly & awesomely IS totally cool! Supreme & sudden appetite (a-gulp!) over anything is more my worry, but don't get me wrong I will eat the hell out of your honey butter fried chicken...I just (probably) won't get in a fist fight over it!

Science, Art and Why We Should Try Harder

There are two things I am thinking about right now. One is this article from a recent New Yorker magazine about scientifically altering planet Earth in case of an atmospheric meltdown. The other is a recent photography show at TEAM gallery. The former terrifying in the possibility that we might need to eventually grow clouds in the sky just so we don't all die, the latter terrifying in the fact that art is still often applauded if it is about sex, sex and animals even, sex and animals and bright colors, even in the face of the aforementioned problems circling the globe...

I don't want to be too down on contemporary art. I think some people make great, meaningful work. I think some artists are really great graphic designers/thinkers. I also think some artists working now are good at capturing the party/spectacle that a lot of the American art scene has devolved into...And I even think the artist whose show I am a little bothered by makes some important work too, in the past he has chronicaled groups of (naked) people and places outside of our normal existence, making artifacts of subcultures and sublandscapes. But closing down a block for a party to sell really expensive sexy sexy naked pictures of people laying about with animals is a little orgiastic, the label of "art" a thin veil of civility. (Seen here are the color fields that provide the backgrounds of the photos in the show, photos whose titles usually refer to the background color...)

In the article about "geoengineering" there was a profile of a scientist who has constructed one of the most hopeful inventions I have seen to date: a kind of inverse smokestack lined with honeycomb shaped bricks coated in amines (nitrogen based organic compounds?  am I getting that right?), which can literally take the carbon dioxide out of the air through a process that uses heat (heat that can come from the manufacturing that is causing the CO2 release), invoking a process that can actually filter, and recycle, the very thing we have been polluting the atmosphere with. This invention is far more beautiful and important to me in the grand scheme of creativity right now...and I don't see a block party in its honor.

I am not saying people should shun contemporary art, art can spark creative ideas. It can make a scientist think in a new way, moving ideas from gallery to lab, a cultural conversation that we should always be having or at least on the verge of. Art can be a locus for ingenuity and cultural progression, a place to better humanity. Why would an artist working today settle with anything less than a beautiful expression of ideas? Who knows, maybe monkey genitals do have an idea? (Something about our likeness to beasts? Which can also be seen in the riotous publicity & atmosphere surrounding this show!) And maybe even these pieces will spark an idea in someone that is far greater than themselves...but just think of what ideas could flourish if the artistic community, a place where people do look for innovation, variation and cultural advancement, were working on a higher intellectual plane? What ideas could be sparked outside of the museum or gallery if the museum or gallery were filled with ideas?

A Massive Storm

Here is another install shot of Brent's current show up in New York! A new film, a new sculpture and a new soundtrack! Woohoo! If you can't make it to the show (!!which is up until June 23rd so you have plenty of time!!) you can actually hear one of the first demos of the soundtrack over here to get a tiny bit of the bigger picture...Brent begins each of his films with scraps of his writings which he then takes into the barn and screams and beats on instruments and pounds his foot, scaring away all wildlife, creating the first step in his layered soundtracks that are at the core of everything he does. The demos, which are rarely used in the end, are a small building block of the first step towards a larger project which, in this case, has turned into an engulfing sensory experience that you can only view in person! When I was passing through the gallery last week a woman made space for me to sit and view the piece and said "Sit, it is important work" an encounter that made me tear up a little thinking of this demo and the time spent working towards an understanding audience...so please, go see this piece that we are so very proud of!

Landscapes & Machinescapes, Goodbye Troy NY!

I didn't think it was possible but...there is a chance this is my final broadcast about EMPAC/Troy, NY folks! I know, I know, you are probably sick of me gushing over this incredible science and art mecca (click this!! It explains part of my obsession with this space!!!) that sits on a mountainside in upstate New York but a town that boasts Laurie Anderson as a long term artist in residence while also being home to the delicious old school neon hub that is Snowman Ice Cream is some sort of dream that I often find myself waking from!

My potential last trip up here was, as usual, packed with tons of awe...beginning with the thesis show of the artist Sena Clara Creston! Her final project, titled Machinescapes, reworked discarded technology (such as old pop out dvd drives and vcr motors) to create a small mechanical landscape of trees popping up and down, waves jerkily crashing and a lightbulb sun precariously rising and falling in the background! The piece (partly pictured here), whose fragility and mechanical clatter put you on edge while also making you get lost in the sweet glow of Christmas lights and movement, was a DIY wonderland! I really hope Sena goes on to make more work and expand her already intriguing analogue dream of a portfolio! (pssst, Sena, if you ever read this I am so pro you making music box work!!! Have you seen this? You can totally make these from scratch!)

Following this, Brent & I traveled to the home of Ryan Jenkins, a friend and EMPAC employee who supersedes these labels and most others! A founder of the Troy Bike Rescue, my welding mentor, our sometimes fabricator and an all around awesome fella Ryan, Nora and their dog Gunni's home (pictured below!) is such an expression of who they are and the ethos they live by: homemade stacked garden beds, wood and axe at hand for firewood, every hand picked and made detail of their home tucked into the quiet back streets of Troy...in the strange juxtaposition that is this town, also tucked next to a gun club! Which, thankfully, isn't open all too often! Thanks for a beautiful time in your beautiful home guys!

Next on the agenda was brunching with the brilliance of Kathy High! An artist and RPI professor, Kathy makes political and scientific work that is so dense each project is an opus! Her piece that sticks with me most is the aptly titled Blood Wars the core of which revolves around pitting blood samples against eachother, watching the white cells fighting it out until only one is left and then sending the victor onto a new battle of blood. As this "game" is played some details of the persons blood are posted creating a rounded database on our understanding of our blood's properties, it's relation to our lives and exploring our everchanging notions of immunity & safety-- and this is just the tip of the brilliant Kathy iceburg! Kathy also clued me into The Sanctuary for Independent Media, which I didn't know a thing about despite my constant time in Troy!

The Sanctuary, which if I ever return I promise check out, seems to be a refuge for media arts hidden in an old church in downtown Troy. Workshops, concerts and all kinds of events to teach and foster creativity, culture and community through media seems to be what goes on here...most recently even hosting a traveling Flaherty Film Seminar just last week, complete with a screening and a pot luck!!! This is my kind of place! Donate your time! Or your money! Or even your old tech equipment to this amazing, forward thinking org!

We still need to mix some of the sound and video from our recording up at EMPAC so there is a slight chance I will return to this magical land of farmers markets, independent media and experimental arts/sciences but, for now, I wave goodbye to a great run in a great place filled with the most incredible people! And I hope that the bridge being built between those up the mountain and those down below it in this slightly conflicting region (see note above about gun club next to kids playing) continues to strengthen!

If My Soul Had a Shape

Another art event we were able to pop into while in New York was the newest incarnation of Seven. Seven is a consortium of seven (duh!) galleries that come together to form a large scale group show that coincides with larger art fairs, another form of alternative exhibition that I saw during my time in the Miami art fair scene awhile back. Seven is sort of a calm in the storm of massive, overwhelming art fair culture, usually taking place on the outskirts of the larger circus, in a warehouse or other non-art space, where the individual work is truly what is on display and the overall feel is a little more on the personal side as gallerists and artists roam around alongside whoever wanders in which, given the location, is not regulated to the woman looking to find a Picasso to match her hallway (I really did hear someone say that while attending Art Basel Miami Beach a few years back...)!

The current exhibit took place in Pierogi Gallery's recent expansion, the Boiler Room (a former industrial boiler room in a factory space), in Williamsburg Brooklyn and featured work from Pierogi Gallery, Hales Gallery, Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, BravinLee, Postmasters Gallery, P·P·O·W and Winkleman Gallery. There was a lot of high concept shapes going on so it wasn't exactly my cup of tea...this one piece by Andy Yoder of a plastic flower covered half circle, reflected in a mirror to form a ring,"tied" to a thick metal rope from the ceiling was definitely my favorite...something about the delicate seeming texture of the fake flowers, with the metal rope-like heaviness and the illusion of the circle made this buoyant form feel weighty and false at the same time, very elegant...Actually, a lot of the art in the exhibit was very nice to look at but I don't know if I understood much of it? Or if the meanings I was inferring were anywhere near their intention? Then I had a weird encounter when someone there made fun of me for taking a photo of the moon...the supermoon I should say! It was unintentional, the photo of the moon, I was trying to take a picture of a glowing rooftop...but then I got totally bummed that someone would make fun of someone else for taking a picture of the moon? And then I got bummed that I would let a jumble of shapes in a warehouse irk me at all...so, in the words of Kurt Vonnegut: "Getting mad at a work of art is like getting mad at a banana split." Moving on.

...the next day we headed over to an opening at Ronald Feldman Fine Arts where I saw one of the best art shows I've seen in awhile, Collapse: The Cry of Silent Forms. Brandon Ballangée, an artist and biologist, makes work focusing on natural forms, in this particular exhibit the changing tragic beauty in animal specimens. Images of deformed birds, vividly displayed jars of stacked undersea creatures (pictured), skillfully lit petri dishes of stained malformed amphibian skeletons, video of natural disaster came together to form an overall understanding of the state of tiny things on a global environmental scale. In this great interview with Ballangée over at Ecological Art.Org he recounts experiences he has had that have formed his desire to focus on this type of work, raising awareness to the public both through art and science, shaping an understanding of what it means to be a living creature: "A group of inner city kids pull a net through a polluted section of an urban river-from the broken glass and beer cans they find feisty green crabs, silver-sided fish, and a seahorse- There are yells of excitement at seeing the wiggling catch and a sense of melancholy when looking at the trash." The artist reduces the tragic state of ecological dysfunction into beatific forms, reminding us of the inherent wonder, awe and intricacy in every living thing, a truth that should inspire us all! Ballangée's show is an intersection of biology and beauty and social responsibility and I loved it! Go see this show!

Vases, Vessels and Vino

While in New York to install the sculpture this past week I kept seeing hoards of people with shining new tote bags with the word "Frieze" emblazoned across them and then I remembered...the inaugural New York edition of the Frieze Art Fair was underway out on Randall's Island! I wasn't able to make it out there (mostly due to time constraints and the $40+ price tag for a ticket) even despite the fact that it took place in the alluring setting of an island off the Manhattan coast but... I was able to make it to a few other events that were going on thanks to the palpable Spring art fair buzz!

Our pal & artist Chris Doyle came by to see Brent's newest install and invited us along to a gallery event he was on his way to. Trusting Chris while remaining completely skeptical as we stood outside of an old towering apartment building with air conditioners dripping overhead and various European tourists passing us on the stairs insisting "No English! Yes?," our skepticism was only alleviated after climbing a beautiful staircase and emerging into a crowded apartment room full of loud women, olives, sushi platters, drinks and slyly placed art. Apparently galleries, or other art type orgs in need of semi-permanent exhibition space, will often rent out apartments or hotel rooms in cities where art fair season is full bloom in order to showcase work during the hub bub and crowds associated with this time of year. I had heard about this phenomenon while in Miami but this was the first time I experienced it in the flesh, and it is as strange as it sounds! The San Francisco based Catharine Clark Gallery keeps such a space in the Chelsea district of New York opening its doors by appointment and for small openings at different points throughout the year. The exhibit on view featured the work of Stephanie Syjuco, a woman who I briefly met during this fun, odd little event and whose pieces, after mulling over the complexity of, I have grown to love! ...and after a little internet research, whose work I have apparently loved for years-- I didn't realize that she was behind the Counterfeit Crocheting project (fashion and craft lover friends of mine, click that link!)!!!!

The work itself was composed of print out images of vases downloaded from an online archive of Asian Art which were then tacked to wooden, lasercut boards to make them into 2d/3d prop-like objects, re-appropriating these historic, intangible pieces and curating a personal collection of these works. I reaaaallly like this idea, reclaiming a piece of hidden/archived art with all of its culture and history and revisioning it as an expression of both an individual and also for public exhibition. I am not getting into any original object argument over here but I will say that using an open-digital-resource as a medium leads to a whole new conversation in how culture can be broadcast, information & meaning articulated and the different value systems of art! Syjuco's project, titled Raiders (Redux), is soo layered and so thoughtful and, on top of that, so pretty in their rickety groupings and subtly perfect design! I love it! And what a lovely event! Score one for a little beauty in the madness of NY art fairs! And score a big one for Stephanie Syjuco who was by far one of the nicest artists I have ever come across in my many art world dealings! Hurrah! (And apologies for the not so great images of the art-- it was super crowded in there!)

The Electric Grandmother Sessions

I have been missing from the internet lately! What have I missed guys?? Tell me all! Mostly I have been away from the lovely glow of my computer screen thanks to an insanely busy schedule that included three separate trips to New York City, three separate trips to upstate NY and have amounted to me sleeping in a total of three guest rooms, o,  and one weird old mansion...a mansion you might ask? Yes! A mansion in upstate New York filled with some of my favorite bandmates! An event brought about by our live studio recording of Gravity Was Everywhere Back Then up at the Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center!

Argeo, the new music curator at EMPAC, brought us up to Troy as part of a DVD series the organization is working on that will feature dance, film, music and everything in between, documenting the history and the future of the emerging field of performance art, a series that will give a more concrete existence to an often overlooked, amorphous, ethereal genre! So, Brendan Canty, Drew Henkels, Todd Chandler, Alan Scalpone, Mike McGinley, Brent Green & I spent three days performing Gravity in a black box theater outfitted with the best of sound & video recording equipment, the most amazing (patient) technical operators and even, briefly, the master of filmed music documentation Jem Cohen!!!

It really was a surreal experience being inside a black sealed room all day while people climbed on the rafters of the ceiling hanging lights & mics, while others scooted around with a bonafide Jimmy jib camera and others positioned walls of acoustic tile panels with the touch of a computer screen....listening to playbacks in the sound engineering room made me feel like I was pretending to reenact sequences from Gimme Shelter... watching the film repeatedly, making the intricacies and work we did stand out in such a big way, growing and observing the soundtrack from a new place each time...at the end of the night going "home" to a giant house where people took turns cooking up insane meals and doing piles of dishes and staying up late into the night to argue on the merits of graffiti and have a midnight viewing of The Electric Grandmother (a mildly terrifying childhood favorite of mine that just gets even more insane with age!)- it was all wonderful! The whole adventure was amazing and I am so glad I got to share it with people so dear to my heart! I really cannot wait to see and hear how it all came out! And share it with everyone else too!

...and also, I know I do a lot of EMPAC applauding over here but it is an organization worth applauding, any group that consistently supports progressive work in the ways that they do really should be celebrated in a big way by anyone working in the arts! Speaking of which, a new round of EMPAC residency proposals are open, due May 14th! Apply apply! Being a part of this international, forward thinking support system for artists has been so heartening for us I can only wish others to feel the same way! Now, to unpack the (stinky) tour van and try to figure out where we left our truck's spare tire during last weeks journey....? Hmmm....

The Worst Fate of All Is To Have No Fate At All

So...here it is! The first install images of what we have been working on in New York this past weekend! To Many Men Strange Fates Are Given will be on view starting May 5th! Our pal/sometimes cellist John Swartz took these amazing photos of the piece while we were installing and I thought I should give a little sneak peek!

I do have to say though that you must experience the work in person if you can! The complexity of the polarizer, the soundtrack, the animation are all delicate in a massively heavy way that you can not get through words & pictures alone!


The piece is up until June 23rd at Edlin Gallery, 134 10th Ave. (btwn 18th & 19th) so you have plenty of time to go and see it! Being that we made it in a barn in the middle of nowhere and also in the glass laboratory of some mad scientists my perspective on it is in a strange spot to say the least, would love to know what you think! Hope you like it!