Part 1: Evenings of Landscape in Sound and Performance – 4/24, 8PM

THURSDAY, APRIL 24TH, 8PM
Performances by: Melissa F. Clarke and collaboration between Audra Wolowiec and Jeanann Dara

OF LANDSCAPE, currently on view at our space, looks into the artificial and unstable images represented by the aestheticized idea of landscapes. Creating a link between the space we observe and the one we find ourselves in, it investigates the relationship between the current condition of images – as artifacts – and territory. The exhibited work explores, dissects, and re-informs the ways we think about data, nature and art through alternative methods of depicting geographic entities. These “neolandscapes” evince a penchant for incorporating new technologies into the process of graphically representing spatial knowledge.

Landscape can refer to an assemblage of land, people, place and ecosystem. Culturally mediated through design, representation and experience, a landscape is already an artifice before it has become the subject of a work of art. This exhibition looks into landscape as an experience: Perception overtime transforms the landscape into story. The description tends to replace the object; it erases certain aspects of it and enhances others. A person’s experience of a place occurs through the medium of the sensing body.

EVENINGS OF LANDSCAPE IN SOUND AND PERFORMANCE is a two-night series of performance events that enhance this idea of landscape.  It features artists whose work relates to landscape through field recording, soundscapes or other interpretations that create the experience of a particular acoustic environment, an acoustic ecology or new ways of representing the electroacoustic space.

This session of An Evening of Landscape in Sound and Performance, showcases Melissa F. Clarke and a collaborative performance by Audra Wolowiec and Jeanann Dara. Clarke will perform with an electroacoustic glass sculpture, candle light, and digital manipulations of data and field recordings of ice and water from the Arctic. Wolowiec and Dara present Detour, a set of shifting sound and overlapping projections of language and place where the visual and aural intermingle.

Melissa F. Clarke is a New York based interdisciplinary artist whose work employs data and generative self-programmed compositional environments. Clarke works at the intersections of research, data, science and art. She recently returned from the Artic, where she made research on ice and information related to the terrain shaped by it.  Clarke often works across mediums as a way to look at hybridizations of wilderness and technological spaces—towards considerations of nature at the center of human experience, myth, science, and information collection. Melissa received her master’s degree from New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program and was a recent artist in residence at the Simons Center for Geometrty and Physics.  Clarke’s recent installation projects, Untitled Antartica and Sila, reconnect seismic data collected from beneath the glaciers with its organic source.

Audra Wolowiec is a Brooklyn based artist. Her interdisciplinary work mines themes of communication and modes of exchange. Through sculpture, sound, text and performance, she explores the idea of a fading connection to create an elusive but shared experience. For her recent installation, Concrete Sound, based on acoustic foam used in sound recording studios, she created a modular series of cast concrete sculptures that accumulate to form muted landscapes. Her work leans on materiality and process to explore both the physical and ephemeral nature of communication, allowing experiences that merge the sensory with the conceptual. Audra currently teaches in the Art, Media, and Technology Department at Parsons The New School for Design.

Jeanann Dara is a violist, composer, improvisor, collaborator, and curator based in New York City. Her recent performances include SIGNAL Gallery with Tim Bruniges installation Mirrors, Eyebeam, and Spectrum.

Performances by Jacob Kirkegaard and Aki Onda on Thursday, May 1st.