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17/11/2011

Expanded Music Project

Land of Tomorrow, Louisville

Land of Tomorrow (LOT) is pleased to present the Expanded Music Project, a showcase of work illustrating the intersection between art and music. The opening reception will be held at our Louisville location on November 18th at 7pm and the show will run through the 3rd of January. Included in this exhibition will be work by Heather Cantrell, Aurora Childs, Saiman Chow, Geneva Jacuzzi, Leslie Lyons, Andrea Stanislav, as well as Raurouw with Shedding, Thieves Like Us, Peaking Lights with artist Letitia Quesenberry, musician EMA with artist Jacob Heustis, and HIRSUTA design firm.

The premise of this show is to highlight the fluidity between creative forms and artistic practices. The influence of album art, video production, stage design, graffiti and the appropriation tactics of remixing have established an ongoing conversation between artists and musicians. This dialogue between visual artist and musician continues to play a major role, and creative forces as diverse as Elvis, The Velvet Underground, Talking Heads, Pink Floyd, and Afrika Bambaataa have delved into the realms of the visual and the auditory to produce work that both fields accept and champion.

Heather Cantrell’s ongoing Study in Portraiture, previously shown in New York, Los Angles, and London, will be presented as a city-specific “Act” focusing on the distinct musical identity of Louisville. A Study in Portraiture is a series of photographic portraits that explore the relationship between identity and performance. Each photograph is the result of a specific encounter between the subject and the photographer, structured by an elaborate and evolving range of exotic costumes and props which both expound and parody the experience of “otherness” as it has been elaborated through history, especially the history of photography.

This project I Want to Teach the World to Sing is a continuation focusing on Louisville musicians. As part of the installation, it will also include a limited edition 7″ of Cantrell’s previous band, Drinking Woman (from Louisville 1991 to 1994), doing a cover of the New Seekers’ I Want to Teach the World to Sing.

Andréa Stanislav will include four works including Diamond Dog and Alex DeLarge. Both of these pieces incorporate references to the Sex Pistols, using sound to recontextualize dystopic phrases and address the failures of utopian ideals while exploring reflection as a tool to draw the viewer into the work. The reflection allows the viewer to explore their own position in history and culture and points out the futility of utopian desires.

Andréa Stanislav is a contemporary artist whose practice includes: sculpture, video installation, collage constructions, and public art. Her work has been featured in solo and group exhibitions around the world, and she is a 2010 recipient of a McKnight Artists Fellowship for Visual Arts.

The work of Andréa Stanislav displays an acute awareness of the tension between Man’s attempts to create ideal conditions for himself and the terrible irony that those attempts are often mapped out through trails of carnage and destruction. She offers a series of elegant yet challenging reflections on the limits and failures of the utopic imagination. Reflection is a key word in Stanislav’s lexicon, as it serves to indicate both the means and the ends of her artistic endeavor. In her work, the viewer is not simply invited but compelled, by use of reflective surfaces, to interrogate their own position vis-a-vis the artwork. These surfaces, revealing the face of the viewer at every turn, and often to infinity, point to the futility of our attempts to escape our unsatisfactory current conditions.

Dub-pop duo Peaking Lights and artist Letitia Quesenberry will collaborate on Sound Garden. Using record players, CD players, cassette machines and tape machines, they will create a sonic replication of a Japanese rock garden. Quarter-inch tape loops and hand-altered vinyl recordings provide layers of sound. Portable record players and quarter-inch tape machines stand in as rocks. Concentric vinyl tape circles represent raked gravel. This decidedly analog, lo-fi perspective aims to give viewers an unforgettable sensory experience.

Aaron Coyes and Indra Dunis are PEAKING LIGHTS, from Los Angeles, CA and Madison, WI. Their sparkly, rhythmic, crackled and layered sound originates from Coyes’ hand- made synthesizers, pieced together from found consumer cast-offs: alarm clocks, keyboards and assorted small electronics. Letitia Quesenberry is an artist living and working in Louisville, KY. Intrigued by the ephemeral, her large-scale drawings and multimedia images seek to explore absence and the unknown by introducing moments of perceptual uncertainty.

Musician EMA and artist Jacob Heustis will team up to construct an interactive recording booth that will give gallery goers a chance to record their own “demo.” The piece directly focuses on the importance of “vibe” and the “demo” as a sketch for a more definitive recording that becomes an album or a single. This allows the audience members, both music insiders and casual listeners, to place themselves in the midst of the song production process.

Aurora Childs’s work, Lost in the Forest, uses the writings of Carl Jung to explore memories and the life that they tend to take on, illustrating that memories become fragmented, like dreams, as time creates distance. She uses quiet animals and an imaginary color scheme to explore the haunting nature of memory and the subconscious.

Investigating the effects of an artist’s return to her childhood home, Leslie Lyons will show a constellation of photographs inspired by the David Bowie song “Who Can I Be Now?”

The genesis of this self-portrait series is the David Bowie song, recorded in 1975 but not available until a later version of the Young Americans CD was released in 1991. With the idea being to extrapolate a personal visual journey with lyrics from the song as signifiers, images formed around the conundrum of gender identity and feminism, coupled with the theatrics of personal history and meaning. Lyons explored the phenomenon of memetics which identifies the “meme” as the mental equivalent of the “gene” suggesting that cultural transfers of information are just as influential as DNA on persona. The artist’s grandmother’s girdle, her father’s football helmet, and even her daughter are in conversation with the past, present, and future in a singular moment, allowing the artist to explore a self that she both imagines and recognizes.

The work of Austrian psychiatrist, Wilhelm Reich, is at the foundation of Lyons’s investigation as a contemporary artist with the extraction of a singular theme from Reich’s research. Individualism is the means by which to free ourselves not only from the perils of a tyrannical societal construct but also from our own emotional pain. Specifically Reich’s phrase, ‘Your depths are your great future,’ propels the artist forward toward the exploration and presentation of those depths.

The Hirsuta design firm will present a re-examination of the form and context of the Disco Ball in Variations on the Disco Ball or, the Bee Gees Have Left the Building.
Hirsuta is an experimental design practice located in Los Angeles committed to the synthesis of research and practice. The office is a full service architectural, interior, landscape, and object design firm specializing in advanced form and the integration of emerging technologies in construction.

Hirsuta promotes an emerging vitalist-materialist model for architectural production that privileges the role of matter in the design process. Traditionally, matter in architecture has been understood as secondary to organization, its shape beholden to underlying and essential diagrams. For Hirsuta, there is no pre-existing diagrammatic condition. Diagrams and their progeny, organizations, are secondary and emergent, culled from the play of matter and energy in space and time. Matter first, organization second. This way of thinking leads to an architecture of effective atmospheres that thrives on immediate, sensual stimulation and material fact. Our ambition for architecture lies not in what it is so much as how it feels, engaging material dynamics in the production of form to create a direct appeal to the senses.

The installation, Nucleus, by Raurouw is the continuation of a series of works that the group has been occupied with since their start in 2010. The work of Raurouw revolves around the human being as an intelligent, rational, irrational, and intuitive complex system of behaviors and actions-reactions.

Nucleus is a spatial construct of intensified light and, at the same time, the origin of three phases to be seen in this show. Scaffolding, consisting of transparent planes, bears a network of highly reflective mirrors that is the result of the concentrated bundle of light rays. The spatial composition of the planes and the mirrors articulates the physical body of the work and creates a geometrical fabrication that stands independently. The three phases orchestrate a process of gradual growth towards a full existence where the light expands into the space of LOT: nucleus (rebirth), pulsing (struggle), no way back (take off).

The sound constructs of Nucleus intertwines the phases of growth through a sequence of tracks that encapsulate the shifting effects in the social and audio-spatial relations that each phase suggests. The music themes in Nucleus are a result of an interactive dialogue with composer and musician Shedding. From the very beginning – the interaction between music composition and spatial design intelligence was the driving factor of Nucleus and created a collaborative process of activity that led to the outcome of the show.

Land of Tomorrow’s mission is to support artists in the production of their multidimensional works. This is achieved through collaborative channels with artists working in the areas of photography, video, sculpture, architecture and design. This project will continue to be a part of the future curatorial trajectory of the LOT gallery.

Image: Thieves Like Us

Opening Reception November 18 @ 7pm
Admission is free to this exhibition and to the reception.

Land of Tomorrow
233 W. Broadway Louisville KY, 40202
Monday – Friday 10-5 or by appointment

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