Apr 2007
sneak preview
04/25/07 Filed in: Art
MEDIA ARCHEOLOGY
FESTIVAL: BELOW-FI
Aurora Picture Show- April 19- 21
written by Johnny DeKam & Bree Edwards originally for Glasstire webzine
A relatively new April tradition in Houston is the annual Media Archeology Festival presented by the Aurora Picture Show. Now in its fourth year, this festival of live Electronic and Performance Art is emerging from the underground, and is now easily comparable to the mini-festivals and one-night events in cities such as New York, Portland, and Los Angeles. This year’s Media Archeology was guest-curated by New York’s charismatic Nick Hallett and featured three full nights of performances in several of the city’s hippest little venues. This year’s theme, “Below Fi,” featured “hackers, benders and overall fans of the analog” — artists definitively concerned with utilizing non-digital techniques in their work.
The festival kicked off with an “expanded cinema” program featuring performances by Ray Sweeten and Bruce McClure at the Aurora’s own converted church-micro-cinema in the Houston Heights. Sweeten’s set was performed with deft precision using an oscilloscope to visualize his electronic music compositions with generative Lissajous figures. Bruce McClure’s 6’s Two 8’s: Dopes to Infinity was a challenging structuralist performance employing heavily modified 16mm film projectors that sent much of the audience scrambling for their earplugs. The Q&A session following the performance provoked many questions about the artists’ hacked machines, fostering a dialogue ranging from the esoteric to the utterly geeky.
Night two took place in the courtyard sanctuary behind Domy Books, which shares backyard space with the hipster-haunt Café Brasil. As the audience quietly sipped raspberry margaritas, Dynasty Handbag (aka Jibz Cameron) stunned us with her trashy get-up and amazing body language. Summoning feminist performance art tradition, Cameron sang, twitched, and gesticulated in conversation with her recorded voice and a homespun Electro-soundtrack.
The second set, by Nautical Almanac, represented the Circuit Bender movement. The artists brought an impressive array of “bent” instruments, off the shelf technology that’s been thoroughly hacked to produce new, unintended sounds. This performance was particularly anti-musical, involving percussive and explosive noise blips and bleeps. It appeared to be a largely unstructured improvisation intended to fabricate a visceral connection between the sound and the performer’s bodies. We noted an affinity with the early music of John Cage, but flavored with the baggage of new age politic... which we found to be distasteful in combination with the musical assault.
This evening also introduced us to the visuals of Mighty Robot, who supported both acts using an elaborate optical contraption to create moving images. Their setup can only be described as a mad scientist’s VJ lab, including a light-table, water, transparencies, motors, camera, LED lights, slide projector, and various other objects employed to create ‘interferences’ in the projection. Most notably, there was not a laptop anywhere to be seen. This very tactile approach to live visuals was most gratifying, in a Luddite sense.
We returned for the final night of the festival, which was held at The Orange Show, the spectacular folk-art monument in Houston’s East End. Just about any show is great at The Orange Show, because the place is just so uniquely weird and fabulous. Tonight was no exception; it was the perfect setting to end the festival with a bang. By this point a sense of camaraderie had emerged among the festival-goers, and we found ourselves greeting strangers like old friends.
Tonight’s show began with Tristan Perich, who exudes the sex appeal of a rock star with a video game / art damage slant. Wearing sunglasses and a vest created entirely of zippers, Tristan plugged in his limited ‘1bit music’ CD, which is actually a jewel case filled with various circuits that play 40 minutes of ‘live’ music. The sound is akin to a fuzz-boxed Atari, and as the coarse, electro-synth melodies began to pulse, Perich proceeded to play his drum kit furiously, creating a live drum-and-bass track. He plays in a style that emulates what typically only computers can accomplish, which was interesting in that there was always a sense of being ‘off’ – which in the end was actually quite charming.
The grand finale of the festival was a “Swamp-Tech” set by Quintron and Miss Pussycat (shown in the video above.) PopMatters has called them: “The baddest one-man band in America, sure to move your ass and make you laugh,” and they undoubtedly lived up to this claim. Quintron sits at a large organ+Moog trap, complete with Lesley cabinets and car headlights that he lights up on command. Casio-tone beats and a strange light-triggered circuit-bent synthesizer accompany Quintron’s Pentecostal-punk fervor on the organs. Miss Pussycat, dressed in baby blue with a pom-pom on her head, playing maracas while wailing the vocals. A spirited Mighty Robot broke out his film projector, fully keeping pace.
“Everybody stand up!” Quintron yelled, and the audience collectively obeyed. Quintron later beckoned the audience to “join them in the pool”, and gleefully the crowd climbed “into the stage” (see Flckr photos) for some serious bopping. The Orange Show shook with new life tonight that would make Jefferson Davis McKissack proud.
When first reading Hallett’s essay for this years festival, we mis-read the title “Return of the Native” to be “Return of the Naïve”. Not in a negative sense, but rather in the sense of the hobbyist who toils away for hours in the basement. In a time exemplified by “user-generated content” such as YouTube, Facebook, MySpace and Flickr, there is a naïve-tech revolution replacing the polished, specialized productions of the Mass Media (music, television and film). Hallett’s title suggests there is something inherently primitive about what we’ve seen here… or perhaps this is evolution. In any case, you should keep your eyes on the Aurora Picture Show: with this year’s Media Archeology Festival, they have cemented their place as headquarters of Houston’s growing new media scene.
See you next year!
Aurora Picture Show- April 19- 21
written by Johnny DeKam & Bree Edwards originally for Glasstire webzine
A relatively new April tradition in Houston is the annual Media Archeology Festival presented by the Aurora Picture Show. Now in its fourth year, this festival of live Electronic and Performance Art is emerging from the underground, and is now easily comparable to the mini-festivals and one-night events in cities such as New York, Portland, and Los Angeles. This year’s Media Archeology was guest-curated by New York’s charismatic Nick Hallett and featured three full nights of performances in several of the city’s hippest little venues. This year’s theme, “Below Fi,” featured “hackers, benders and overall fans of the analog” — artists definitively concerned with utilizing non-digital techniques in their work.
The festival kicked off with an “expanded cinema” program featuring performances by Ray Sweeten and Bruce McClure at the Aurora’s own converted church-micro-cinema in the Houston Heights. Sweeten’s set was performed with deft precision using an oscilloscope to visualize his electronic music compositions with generative Lissajous figures. Bruce McClure’s 6’s Two 8’s: Dopes to Infinity was a challenging structuralist performance employing heavily modified 16mm film projectors that sent much of the audience scrambling for their earplugs. The Q&A session following the performance provoked many questions about the artists’ hacked machines, fostering a dialogue ranging from the esoteric to the utterly geeky.
Night two took place in the courtyard sanctuary behind Domy Books, which shares backyard space with the hipster-haunt Café Brasil. As the audience quietly sipped raspberry margaritas, Dynasty Handbag (aka Jibz Cameron) stunned us with her trashy get-up and amazing body language. Summoning feminist performance art tradition, Cameron sang, twitched, and gesticulated in conversation with her recorded voice and a homespun Electro-soundtrack.
The second set, by Nautical Almanac, represented the Circuit Bender movement. The artists brought an impressive array of “bent” instruments, off the shelf technology that’s been thoroughly hacked to produce new, unintended sounds. This performance was particularly anti-musical, involving percussive and explosive noise blips and bleeps. It appeared to be a largely unstructured improvisation intended to fabricate a visceral connection between the sound and the performer’s bodies. We noted an affinity with the early music of John Cage, but flavored with the baggage of new age politic... which we found to be distasteful in combination with the musical assault.
This evening also introduced us to the visuals of Mighty Robot, who supported both acts using an elaborate optical contraption to create moving images. Their setup can only be described as a mad scientist’s VJ lab, including a light-table, water, transparencies, motors, camera, LED lights, slide projector, and various other objects employed to create ‘interferences’ in the projection. Most notably, there was not a laptop anywhere to be seen. This very tactile approach to live visuals was most gratifying, in a Luddite sense.
We returned for the final night of the festival, which was held at The Orange Show, the spectacular folk-art monument in Houston’s East End. Just about any show is great at The Orange Show, because the place is just so uniquely weird and fabulous. Tonight was no exception; it was the perfect setting to end the festival with a bang. By this point a sense of camaraderie had emerged among the festival-goers, and we found ourselves greeting strangers like old friends.
Tonight’s show began with Tristan Perich, who exudes the sex appeal of a rock star with a video game / art damage slant. Wearing sunglasses and a vest created entirely of zippers, Tristan plugged in his limited ‘1bit music’ CD, which is actually a jewel case filled with various circuits that play 40 minutes of ‘live’ music. The sound is akin to a fuzz-boxed Atari, and as the coarse, electro-synth melodies began to pulse, Perich proceeded to play his drum kit furiously, creating a live drum-and-bass track. He plays in a style that emulates what typically only computers can accomplish, which was interesting in that there was always a sense of being ‘off’ – which in the end was actually quite charming.
The grand finale of the festival was a “Swamp-Tech” set by Quintron and Miss Pussycat (shown in the video above.) PopMatters has called them: “The baddest one-man band in America, sure to move your ass and make you laugh,” and they undoubtedly lived up to this claim. Quintron sits at a large organ+Moog trap, complete with Lesley cabinets and car headlights that he lights up on command. Casio-tone beats and a strange light-triggered circuit-bent synthesizer accompany Quintron’s Pentecostal-punk fervor on the organs. Miss Pussycat, dressed in baby blue with a pom-pom on her head, playing maracas while wailing the vocals. A spirited Mighty Robot broke out his film projector, fully keeping pace.
“Everybody stand up!” Quintron yelled, and the audience collectively obeyed. Quintron later beckoned the audience to “join them in the pool”, and gleefully the crowd climbed “into the stage” (see Flckr photos) for some serious bopping. The Orange Show shook with new life tonight that would make Jefferson Davis McKissack proud.
When first reading Hallett’s essay for this years festival, we mis-read the title “Return of the Native” to be “Return of the Naïve”. Not in a negative sense, but rather in the sense of the hobbyist who toils away for hours in the basement. In a time exemplified by “user-generated content” such as YouTube, Facebook, MySpace and Flickr, there is a naïve-tech revolution replacing the polished, specialized productions of the Mass Media (music, television and film). Hallett’s title suggests there is something inherently primitive about what we’ve seen here… or perhaps this is evolution. In any case, you should keep your eyes on the Aurora Picture Show: with this year’s Media Archeology Festival, they have cemented their place as headquarters of Houston’s growing new media scene.
See you next year!
frontera 450+ review
04/13/07 Filed in: Art
THE STATION MUSEUM IN
HOUSTON, TX
Written originally for Fluent Collaborative's ...Might be Good webzine
Frontera 450+ is the current exhibition at The Station Museum in Houston, a venue that has developed a reputation for being an edgy space that dares to wrestle with the political. Curator Rosalinda Gonzalez and Station Director James Harithas selected 14 artists as the result of their shared engagement with the sexual violence and brutal murders of young women working in Juárez, Mexico. Frontera 450+ does more than just reflect upon these injustices by effectively intervening and disrupting our apathy.
Juárez is located just across the border from El Paso and is infamous for factories, or maquilas, with abusive labor and environmental practices. Since 1993 over 450 young women have been reported missing or discovered dead in Juárez, and the exhibition takes it name from this heinous statistic.
Two artworks in the show distinctly resonated with me. Maya Goded’s photojournalistic portraits make visual the corruption and ineffectiveness of the authorities. Whereas Lise Bjørne’s poetic wall installation documents the social workshops she organized directly concerned with the violence against women in Juárez. Frontera 450+ is an intergenerational mix of mostly women artists, who are working with diverse mediums. The other artists in the exhibition are Coco Fusco, Carmen Montoya, Margarita Cabrera, Teresa Margolles, Celia Alvarez Muñoz, Sara Maniero, Kaneem Smith, David Krueger, Angela Dillon, Teresa Serrano, Susana Plum and Elia Arce.
One photograph from Maya Goded’s series, Justice for our Daughters / Justicia Para Nuestras Hijas, shows an older woman named Carmelita looking down at a worn snapshot of her son David. Her son was the only person accused in the limited murder investigation of his female cousin’s death. False conviction, often of a family member, is a tactic employed by the Juarez police who are overwhelmed by the scale of the problem and internal corruption. In another of Goded’s photos, Daniel and Julia stand under a clothesline holding a framed portrait of their 15-year-old daughter, Maria Elena Chavez Caldera who “went missing” while working as a domestic servant. There is an awkward familiarity to this image that provokes empathetic feelings.
Lise Bjørne’s Desconocida Unknown Ukjent consists of 1023 cotton labels, stick pins and string. The piece documents the extensive workshops she conducted where amateur embroiderers in over 15 countries gathered to act on behalf of the women of Juárez by stitching the names of the missing and murdered onto garment tag labels. The workshops draw upon the social activity of the quilting bee, layered with 1960s feminist consciousness raisings. The garment labels seamlessly connect to the economic realities of labor in Juárez, while the often crude stitching bears the distinct trace of each participant in the project. The threads are multi-colored, except those that record ‘the unknown’. The language of these labels changes based on the location of where the workshop was held; unknown becomes ukjent, desconocida, amas, and onbekend. The collection of labels, arranged in a morse-code musical score depicting the Mexican national anthem, is decidedly haunting.
This show demonstrates that these artists are willing to address a complex and difficult subject. The Station should be commended for orchestrating the exhibition which serves as a Call to Action on behalf of the women of Juárez. For even if art can only provisionally take-on social and political themes, this exhibition provides momentary address to a large and seemingly irresolvable conflict.
Written originally for Fluent Collaborative's ...Might be Good webzine
Frontera 450+ is the current exhibition at The Station Museum in Houston, a venue that has developed a reputation for being an edgy space that dares to wrestle with the political. Curator Rosalinda Gonzalez and Station Director James Harithas selected 14 artists as the result of their shared engagement with the sexual violence and brutal murders of young women working in Juárez, Mexico. Frontera 450+ does more than just reflect upon these injustices by effectively intervening and disrupting our apathy.
Juárez is located just across the border from El Paso and is infamous for factories, or maquilas, with abusive labor and environmental practices. Since 1993 over 450 young women have been reported missing or discovered dead in Juárez, and the exhibition takes it name from this heinous statistic.
Two artworks in the show distinctly resonated with me. Maya Goded’s photojournalistic portraits make visual the corruption and ineffectiveness of the authorities. Whereas Lise Bjørne’s poetic wall installation documents the social workshops she organized directly concerned with the violence against women in Juárez. Frontera 450+ is an intergenerational mix of mostly women artists, who are working with diverse mediums. The other artists in the exhibition are Coco Fusco, Carmen Montoya, Margarita Cabrera, Teresa Margolles, Celia Alvarez Muñoz, Sara Maniero, Kaneem Smith, David Krueger, Angela Dillon, Teresa Serrano, Susana Plum and Elia Arce.
One photograph from Maya Goded’s series, Justice for our Daughters / Justicia Para Nuestras Hijas, shows an older woman named Carmelita looking down at a worn snapshot of her son David. Her son was the only person accused in the limited murder investigation of his female cousin’s death. False conviction, often of a family member, is a tactic employed by the Juarez police who are overwhelmed by the scale of the problem and internal corruption. In another of Goded’s photos, Daniel and Julia stand under a clothesline holding a framed portrait of their 15-year-old daughter, Maria Elena Chavez Caldera who “went missing” while working as a domestic servant. There is an awkward familiarity to this image that provokes empathetic feelings.
Lise Bjørne’s Desconocida Unknown Ukjent consists of 1023 cotton labels, stick pins and string. The piece documents the extensive workshops she conducted where amateur embroiderers in over 15 countries gathered to act on behalf of the women of Juárez by stitching the names of the missing and murdered onto garment tag labels. The workshops draw upon the social activity of the quilting bee, layered with 1960s feminist consciousness raisings. The garment labels seamlessly connect to the economic realities of labor in Juárez, while the often crude stitching bears the distinct trace of each participant in the project. The threads are multi-colored, except those that record ‘the unknown’. The language of these labels changes based on the location of where the workshop was held; unknown becomes ukjent, desconocida, amas, and onbekend. The collection of labels, arranged in a morse-code musical score depicting the Mexican national anthem, is decidedly haunting.
This show demonstrates that these artists are willing to address a complex and difficult subject. The Station should be commended for orchestrating the exhibition which serves as a Call to Action on behalf of the women of Juárez. For even if art can only provisionally take-on social and political themes, this exhibition provides momentary address to a large and seemingly irresolvable conflict.