February 29, 2024 |
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Thursday, February 29, was the opening of
Silvering Toward Invisible, a group exhibition at Speedwell Contemporary in Portland,
ME, presented by
Lights Out. The show features my audiovisual work along with
photography (often of glowing spiderwebs in the dark) by
Peah Guilmoth, minimal textured landscapes in charcoal by
Emily Nelligan, and poetry by
Kristen Case.
Silvering Toward Invisible is driven by
poetry, both visual and written. During this season the
light is changing, and the warmth of the sun is slowly
returning. We begin to hunger for spring, though it is
months away. We look for evidence of its signs, but a thick
white blanket of snow still covers the ground. We can see
the contours of the landscape through the trees. At this
time the world is at its most stark and elegant and takes on
the impressions of our imaginations. This show will harness
the returning light, the receding darkness, and the bare,
suggestive quality of the landscape waiting to undergo
monumental change. Viewers will encounter moments of
brightness, velvety darkness, and a deep poetic primality
waiting to erupt from beneath the surface.
🌐 More info:
lightsoutgallery.org/silvering
February 24, 2024 |
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On Saturday, February 24, Andrei and I (Phase Shift Collective) created an interactive video installation at a pop-up event
hosted by
Anna Oxygen
in a disused retail space at a dying mall in Ithaca, NY.
At the event, Anna performed an experimental run-through of
The Shapes We Leave Behind, a strange livestream performance in which she greenscreens
herself, wearing various sculptural costumes created by
collaborator
Fawn Krieger, into a surreal video-game-esque landscape filled with
glitchy 3D scanned statues of herself, while also singing and
performing electronic music.
The night ended with a dance party to 80s disco music, with
people dancing inside the video feedback loop of our
installation.
Anna was able to briefly take over this former storefront
space in a mostly empty shopping mall, inserting herself and
her artwork into an appropriately liminal venue during a
sabbatical from her professorship. Thanks to Anna for inviting
us to be a part of this unusual show.
February 16, 2024 |
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On Friday February 16, I performed a collaborative audiovisual
set with
Matthew Ryals
at
The Avalon Lounge
in Catskill, NY. Matthew and I have collaborated before, so
when I found out that he would be performing in the area, I
eagerly joined the bill. Combining modular video synthesis and
camera feedback, I was able to incorporate control voltage
signal's from Matthew's audio synths, introducing synesthetic
interaction between the sound and video.
Other performers included
The Early
from Philadelphia, and
Friends Meeting, ambient duo project of Ben Seretan and M. Geddes Gengras.
It was a lovely evening of dreamy experimental sound. At the
end, The Early and Friends Meeting joined together for a
rather epic jam. The show was also broadcast live on
Wave Farm's WGXC.
January 26, 2024 |
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On January 26, I presented and discussed some excerpts of my
audiovisual artworks at an event called Sound at
Luck Dragon, in Delhi, NY.
Sound is a monthly event at Luck Dragon, in which two
artists or musicians present and talk about their work,
followed by a period of group discussion. In this way, artists
and sonic practitioners are brought into conversation with
both each other, and the local community. The other presenter
for this edition was Sam Tellman, who talked about his
research and design journey toward creating
https://www.sottoinstruments.com/
that's more lightweight and user-serviceable.
Luck Dragon is an art supply shop that also hosts community
events. It was cool to visit this space because the people who
run it also have an open-source audio hardware company, a
pottery studio, various artist spaces, and a private occult
library in the same building. Delhi is about an hour west of
where I'm currently based, so I'm hoping to spend more time
there in the coming months. Thanks to
Brian
for inviting me.
🌐 Visit Luck Dragon's website:
luckdragon.space
December 31, 2023 |
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I've never done this sort of post before, but so much has
happened this year that I feel a need to take one last look
over my shoulder before 2023 is over. This year, I made twice
the average number of posts in the "news" section of
my website, because this year has been full of activities.
Here are some of them:
-
Made myself a new artist website (this very place you're
visiting now!) with hand-coded HTML and CSS; it took a
long time but it was very fun and I learned a lot
-
Helped start
Polyphase Portal, a cooperatively-run online educational space with our
own self-hosted infrastructure (running open-source
software for our website, video classrooms, chat, and
wiki)
-
Attended my third vipassana meditation retreat, and
finished a seven month, 200-hour yoga teacher training,
which not only prepared me to teach others but also helped
me evolve my own yoga practice
-
Left my corporate software development job of the last 5
years, and managed to scrape by for 8 months thus far
without a "day job"
-
Side note: despite being part of a mass media
conglomerate, my team there was small and scrappy, and we
did some cool stuff together. Hats off to the great folks
I worked with.
-
Left Brooklyn, where I've lived off and on for much of my
adult life, and wrapped up
Phase Space, which was run out of the basement of our apartment
there
-
Bought a 1988 Chevy van with
Andrei
and spent 5 months traveling across the US together
-
Did 3 audiovisual performances and 2 artist residencies
-
Co-led 12 in-person video art workshops and demonstrations
across the country
-
Camped in many national parks and other public lands,
experienced many different biomes and landscapes; learned
to identify a bunch of new plants
-
Returned to Catskill Mountains of upstate NY, where I grew
up and then left 12 years ago, with a new appreciation for
its vibrant forests
-
Started — and am still starting — a small business:
Moon Ark Studio
(with 4 clients so far and counting)
This year has been alternately fun, exciting, hectic,
exhausting, and immensely fulfilling in a way I have not quite
experienced before. And the way things are going, it seems
there will be many more adventures in store in the coming
year. Thanks for following along, and I wish you a happy old
year, in the last moments before a new one begins.
