VOLUME is pleased to present Presence, an afternoon of immersive sound, video, and durational performance work at the Torrance Art Museum on June 26, 12-5pm. Presence plays with the multiple meanings of the title to contextualize divergent practices by a unique selection of artists all working across a spectrum of time based media, whether it is video, sound, durational performance, or installation.
Artists include Jen Boyd (audio performance), Frank Bretschneider (screening), Jeff Cain & Mark Steger (collaborative video performance/installation), Heather Cassils & Kadet Kuhne (sound and durational performance), Richard Chartier (sound element), i8u & Cédrick Eymenier (audio/visual performance), Monique Jenkinson (video screening), Mem1 (audio/visual performance), A.B. Miner (film screening), Yann Novak (audio performance), Adam Overton (durational performance), Taisha Paggett (durational performance), Semiconductor (video screening), Sublamp (audio/visual performance).
The Torrance Art Museum is located at 3320 Civic Center Drive, Torrance, CA 90503. Call 310.618.6340 for more information.
Outdoors
Noon-5pm
The Hop-Frog Kollectiv
audio performance
Front Entrance
Noon-5pm
Monique Jenkinson
video sceening
Noon-5pm
A.B. Miner
film screening
Gallery One
Noon-5:00
Taisha Paggett
durational performance
Noon-12:45
Richard Chartier
sound dispersion
12:45-1:00
Semiconductor
video screening
1:00-1:20
Sublamp
audio/visual performance
1:30-1:50
Marc Manning
audio/visual performance
2:00-2:20
Jen Boyd
audio performance
2:30-2:50
Mem1
audio/visual performance
3:00-3:20
Yann Novak
audio performance
3:30-3:50
i8u & Cédrick Eymenier
audio/visual performance
4:00-4:20
Frank Bretschneider
video screening
4:30-4:40
Heather Cassils & Kadet Kuhne
collaborartive performance
Gallery Two
Noon-5pm
Jeff Cain & Mark Steger
video/performance installation
Roaming
Noon-5pm
Adam Overton
durational performance
Presence plays with its multiple meanings to contextualize divergent practices by a unique selection of artists all working across a spectrum of time based media, whether it is video, sound, durational performance, or installation. There will be a collection of gestures, words spoken, interplay of light and sound, moments of silence, focus, transgressions, layered meanings and experiences, noises, the sound of breathing and bodies performing tasks, a deeper awareness of the passage of time.
Presence is supported in part by the Canada Council for the Arts.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Jen Boyd is a sound artist living in Northern CA. She spends time recording her environment and arranges it into layered soundscapes. In these pieces, some sounds unfold naturally while others are processed. For several years Jen has used contact microphones to explore the textures and timbres in trees and her compositions give depth to these delicate sounds. Although her work mostly relies on ‘natural’ sounds she uses a wide variety of sources to paint sonic pictures for the listener. In future projects, Jen will explore the depths of natural sound and its presentation as art through live performance and installation. Jen strives to spark the interest in people of all ages to listen more closely to the environment they live in everyday.
Frank Bretschneider works as a musician, composer and video artist in Berlin. His work is known for precise sound placement, complex, interwoven rhythm structures and its minimal, flowing approach. Described as “abstract analogue pointillism”, “ambience for spaceports” or “hypnotic echochamber pulsebeat”, Bretschneider‘s subtle and detailed music is echoed by his visuals: perfect translated realizations of the qualities found in music within visual phenomena.
Jeff Cain is an artist who investigates cultural, technological, and natural phenomenon and creates interdisciplinary projects that intervene, remodel, and connects these systems. His work has been presented at the Getty Museum, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Musee D’art Modern de Ville de Paris, Track 16, LA Freewaves, and many other Southern California venues. He is also the founder and inventor of RHZ Radio, which was nominated for the Prix Ars Electronica in 2005.
Heather Cassils is an artist, stunt person and a body builder who uses an exaggerated physique to intervene in various contexts in order to interrogate systems of power, control and gender. Often employing many of the same strategies used by FLUXUS and guerrilla theater, her method is multidisciplinary and crosses a spectrum of performance, film, drawing, video, photography and event planning. Cassils is a founding member of the Los Angeles based performance group the Toxic Titties.
Richard Chartier, sound and installation artist, is considered one of the key figures in the current of reductionist electronic sound art which has been termed both “microsound” and Neo-Modernist. Chartier’s minimalist digital work explores the inter-relationships between the spatial nature of sound, silence, focus, perception and the act of listening itself. Chartier’s sound works/installations have been presented in galleries and museums internationally including the 2002’s Whitney Biennial and he has performed his work live across Europe, Japan, Australia, and North America at digital art/electronic music festivals and exhibits.
The Hop-Frog Kollectiv is a Los Angeles/Long Beach based collective focused on experimental arts, political dissent and fever dream realization and are the curators of Thee Dung Mummy, experimental arts gatherings. The Kollectiv formed in 2003 as a medium for experimental artists and musicians to share, create and exhibit their work and has since become a hub of activity for Los Angeles, national and international emerging artists. HFK has realized performances and exhibits across the US and Europe. Their newest incarnation of Thee Dung Mummy (Dung Mummy’s Nomadic Transmissions) focuses on outdoor installations and live shows based in the Mojave Desert. HFK is also known for their intensive drone rituals.
i8u (France Jobin) is a sound/installation/web artist residing in Montreal, Canada. i8u has created solo recordings for nvo (AT), ROOM40 (Australia), bake/staalplaat(Netherlands),as well as many collaborations notably with Goem, Martin Tétreault, David Kristian and recently the album ligne with Tomas Phillips, on the Japanese label, ATAK. i8u’s web work/installations have been shown at Musée National des Beaux-Arts du Québec, Toronto’s Images independent film festival at MIVEAM 06. The AIR Artist-In-\ Residence program in Krems Austria enabled her to create und transit, a sound\ installation set in the cloister of MinoritenKirche in Stein, Austria.
Monique Jenkinson is a multifaceted performing artist whose work places itself in the gaps between dance, theater, drag and performance art. She has created and performed locally and internationally at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, the de Young Museum, and Trannyshack in San Francisco; the New Museum, Danspace Project, Howl Festival and the Stonewall in New York; the Met Theatre in Los Angeles; the Coachella Festival; Gay Pride in Reykjavik; Supperclub in Amsterdam; and Royal Vauxhall Tavern, Horsemeat Disco and SoHo Revue Bar in London.
Kadet Kuhne is a media artist whose work spans the audiovisual spectrum. With the goal of forming somatic experiences which can prompt visceral responses to sound and movement, Kadet openly exposes the use of technology in her practice by employing fragmented, jump-cut edits and amplifying evidence of sonic detritus. This glitch aesthetic, contrasted with layered ambient reflection, is intended to heighten tensions between motion and stasis: a balanced yet heightened “nervous system” to reflect our own. Trained in jazz guitar in her youth, Kadet became attached to the instinctive nature of improvisation, which led her to the California Institute of the Arts where she studied Composition and Integrated Media. Select exhibitions and performances include the Museum of Art Lucerne, LACMA, Musees de Strasbourg, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, REDCAT, Museum of Contemporary Art-LA, Not Still Art Festival, San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery, The LAB, Highways Performance Gallery and the New York Underground Film Festival.
Marc Manning is a artist and musician living and working in San Francisco. He has released music under the monikers legend of boggy creek, everything is fine, red weather tigers, and heavy lids. He has performed extensively on the east and west coasts over the past 10 years. Manning is a veteran of several Philadelphia atmospheric bands, the shoe gazer art rock of “the legend of boggy creek” and cave core rock of “everything is fine.” Likewise his visual art has been well exhibited on both coasts.
Mem1 seamlessly blends the sounds of cello and electronics to create a limitless palette of sonic possibilities. In their improvisation-based performances, Mark and Laura Cetilia’s use of custom hardware and software, in conjunction with a uniquely subtle approach to extended cello technique and realtime modular synthesis patching, results in the creation of a single voice rather than a duet between two individuals. Their music moves beyond melody, lyricism and traditional structural confines, revealing an organic evolution of sound that has been called “a perfect blend of harmony and cacophony” (Forced Exposure).
A.B. Miner is an artist, curator, and curatorial assistant at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. For the Hirshhorn he curated projects with Yoko Ono and Dan Graham and has worked with Smithsonian Artist Research Fellows Runa Islam and Henrique Oliveira. In March of 2010 Miner presented his solo painting show Naked at which Fly 08 was first shown. In spring 2009 he curated Domesticated: Men and the Domestic Interior at Transformer Gallery. In fall 2009 he was awarded a German travel fellowship from the Goethe Institut to spend one month in Berlin in 2010. As an artist he has exhibited extensively and received awards including the D.C. Commission on the Arts and Humanities Young Artist Program Grant and two Artist’s Fellowship Awards. Miner holds an M.F.A. in painting and mixed media from Queens College, CUNY (2000) and a post-graduate certificate in museum studies from the George Washington University (2006).
Yann Novak is a sound artist, composer and designer based in Los Angeles. His compositions have been published by Dragon’s Eye Recordings, The Henry Art Gallery, Infrequency, smlEditions and White_Line Editions. His work utilizes different forms of digital documentation as a point of departure. Through the digital manipulation of these sound and image files, his works serve as a translation from documents of personal experiences into new compositions fueled by the original experience.
Adam Overton is a living composer of experimental music, performance artist, teacher of performance, sound art & multimedia, and a massage therapist based in Los Angeles.
Taisha Paggett is a Los Angeles based choreographer, dancer, teacher, and co-founder of the dance journal project, itch. Her work is inspired by various discourses on the body as an expressive tool and is interested in bridging the sensibility and discourses of both the visual and performing arts.
Semiconductor make moving images which reveal our physical world in flux: cities in motion, shifting landscapes, and systems in chaos. Since 1999, UK artists Ruth Jarman and Joe Gerhardt have worked with digital animation in an attempt to transcend the constraints of time, scale, and natural forces and explore the world beyond everyday experience. Central to these works is the role of sound, as it creates, controls, and deciphers images, exploring resonance through the natural order of things.
Mark Steger is the co-founder and director of osseus labyrint, the preeminent experimental arts entity based in Los Angeles and has performed live in over 100 cities, conducted public workshops, made presentations and attended symposia and broadcast throughout the USA, Canada, Mexico, England, Switzerland, Germany, Austria, Hungary, The Czech Republic, Slovakia, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Australia, New Zealand and over the World Wide Web. Steger’s live performances are experiments that explore the history of the body and its relationship to what it creates. Mark has received numerous awards and grants including a Rockefeller Foundation Multi-Arts Production Grant, a California Arts Council Fellowship, the Durfee Artists Award and 1997 and 2001 Los Angeles Times year end “10 Best” performances lists.
Sublamp is Los Angeles based sound and video artist Ryan Connor. Raised by scientist parents living outside of various national parks in New Mexico, Utah, and Colorado, Ryan developed an early fascination with nature and science that influenced his later work as an artist. Primarily interested in pre-language experience, he uses textural sound and images to explore an intuitive and emotional response to sensory data. His work has been published by Serac (USA), Pehr (USA), SEM (France), Dragon’s Eye Recordings (USA), Friendly Virus (Portugal), Ahora Eterno (Argentina), and soon TRDMRK (USA) and Hibernate Recordings (UK).
ABOUT VOLUME
VOLUME functions as a catalyst for interdisciplinary new media work through exhibitions, performances, events, lectures, and publications. Concentrating on the nexus of music and visual arts practices ranging from the avant-garde to popular culture, VOLUME offers unique opportunities for artists to create and present hybrid works.
