FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contacts:Deborah Oliver (323) 388-7777 Laurie Steelink (310) 264-4678
Track 16 Gallery is pleased to present
Irrational Exhibits 8
Curator: Deborah Oliver
April 16, 8:00 PM – Tickets $12.00 Students $10 w/ ID RESERVATIONS RECOMMENDED: Please call (310) 264-4678
Purchase tickets online
Performance – Installation – Video Art
Screens are the interface of our time, not just for entertainment, but for social, personal and business connections as well. One evening of LIVE ART can counter months of screen time and isolation.
This Spring IRRATIONAL EXHIBITS from curator Deborah Oliver returns to Track 16 Gallery. In this 8th edition of IRRATIONAL EXHIBITS, 15 artists perform simultaneously in a spacious immersive environment that changes you from detached viewer to living participant. This is a unique blend live/ sculputural/durational performance where artists bring the audience into a kinetic and visceral experience. Move freely through the gallery and dwell as long as you time want at each of the performance works exhibited. You are no longer just an observer you are a participant as well. The show creates itself with you and around you.
Performance/Installation/Video by:
Brian Black and Ryan Bulis, Jarred Cairns, Mariel Carranza with Carol McDowell, Carol Cetrone/Perpetua & Company, Alexis Disselkoen and Aaron Valenzuela, Monica Duncan and Ross Karre, Kristina Faragher and Curt LeMieux with Rochelle Fabb and Alec Fraiser, Brennan Gerard and Ryan Kelly, Thinh Nguyen, Liz Nurenberg, Nancy Popp, Christy
Roberts, Steve Shoffner, Ian Trout and Kim Alexander, Del Zamora and Juan Garza
Artists:
Brian Black and Ryan Bulis: “Bubble-Boy Ping-Pong” Brian Black and Ryan Bulis have been working collaboratively to explore their interests in the
psychology of competition and sports. In their sport-based work, the two artists have reflected that the “staged artistry” of these performances often gives way to a genuine urge to win and compete. For this performance, the artists play a game of table tennis in an enclosed plastic chamber complete with ping-pong table. The chamber has fans blowing air currents in the interior of the cylinder. The flow of air affects the ability of the players to make contact with the ball.
Jarred Cairns: “Kiss and Tell” Serving with honor and integrity and not their voices, gay military members fight for our country and many have given their lives in her service. Every day, they live in fear of “don’t ask, don’t tell”, of being dishonored in their profession, community and service.
Mariel Carranza with Carol McDowell: “Stone Soup” with videos by Carol McDowellCarranza’s performance will deconstruct the folk story, Stone Soup, to interpret its duality – fable’s rejection and its possibility to arrive to a new order in relation to our current human state. Mariel Carranza Is a Los Angeles based artist and in using her body as sculpture,Carranza’s work challenges conventional notions of the time, space, and corporeal constraint. Carol McDowell is an interdisciplinary dance artist and scholar.
Carol Cetrone/Perpetua & Company “window of time” Choreographer and filmmaker Carol Cetrone (aka Perpetua) translates the physical as a rhythmic drama. The dancers embody a cinematic dream as seen through an intimate perspective. In this “window of time”, we are on the cusp of revolution. We see ourselves for the first time, we are moments away from our own power…. With this in mind, Cetrone animates the scene through her use of movement and gesture and creates a site specific work within the permanently installed “railroad dining car” at Track 16.
Alexis Disselkoen and Aaron Valenzuela “knotted” 2011 Alexis Disselkoen uses event-based situations to connect contemporary issues of identity and interpersonal relations. Her performances aim to disrupt constructions of power that inform art production and viewership. Aaron Valenzuela’s sculptures and installations work through consumer culture, fashion, and the body to exploit the unresolved spaces and possibilities between the organic and inorganic. The
artists come together for knotted, utilizing the properties of fabric to investigate the implications of labor and collaboration.
Monica Duncan: “Rochester Knocking” and “Légerdemain” a co- collaboration with Ross Karre Monica Duncan and others will perform excerpts from Rochester Knocking, a multi-media instrumental-theater performance. Following each iteration of Rochester Knocking will be performances of the collaborative work legerdemain, a piece for solo guiro and video projection, performed and co-composed by percussionist and visual artist, Ross Karre. The turn of the century middle-class home included numerous technological devices with which Americans developed strange relationships. The parlor piano, the living room radio, Brownie cameras and door hinges merged into the 19th/20th century American lifestyle, as their users adopted a repertoire of gestures and sounds transcending pure object-hood. Via psychoanalytic experiments with hysterics, human radio antennae, and vibration therapy,Rochester Knocking conjures the spirit of silent film star, Louise Brooks to lead a vaudevillian tour of real and imagined historical homes.
Kristina Faragher and Curt LeMieux with Rochelle Fabb and Alec Fraiser: “Twelve From The Underground” Video Seven Video seven from the “Twelve from the Underground” series is centered upon a young boy, Clifton Lowery, who lived and died in the state of Utah from 1900 to 1908. Clifton was the grandson of a Mormon Bishop and the twelfth child of twelve children. The work features Rochelle Fabb as Clifton’s mother and Alec Frasier as his ailing older brother.
Brennan Gerard and Ryan Kelly: “Untitled” 2011 Collaborating since 2003, Brennan Gerard and Ryan Kelly approach art as a series of experiments to work through questions of spectatorship, desire, authorship, and the formation of political consciousness. Their hybridized works—combining performance, choreography, text, sound, and video—draw from a wide range of discourses to articulate alternatives to a world entertained 24/7 by spectacle and celebrity culture. Untitled (2011) will continue the artists’ exploration, via scores and mechanical reproduction, of choreography and the minimal differences that emerge when a group of individuals performs a similar task.
Thinh Nguyen: “Body as a Battleground” The body function in this piece as a contested site, a public surface upon which to project identity and ethnic background. Through the act of erasure with paint, questions about biological differences with regard to racist and sexist labels are invoked.
Liz Nurenberg: “Cloud” My Sculptural objects act as experience stations where viewers can form relationships both to the work and to other viewers. Interactivity allows me to explore intimacy, personal space,and how the body physically connects with something while confusing the line between viewers and viewed. The handmade nature of my work evokes intimacy, suggesting the presence of human effort or authorship. Sound acts as an inner voice, which can create a subtle sense of awkwardness. These touches come together to build a scene where interactions happen and narrative forms.
Nancy Popp will continue her critique of architectural space through interventions and gestures that rupture and reframe that space. Using the site of the gallery to explore ways in which limitations and oppressions are internalized and, consciously or unconsciously, repeatedly played out, Popp’s interventions address the complicity inherent within institutional structures, gendered relationships, and power dynamics. Popp is a Los Angeles-based artist working with performance, video, drawing and photography. Her projects create ruptures of geography and identity among sites of body and place, and subsequently wrestle with the boundaries of both.
Christy Roberts “Christy Robert, Deforested, Defrosted” 2011 Southern California Artist, Christy Roberts, creates experiences and objects that explore the tension between humans and their social, physical, and natural environments. Her currents projects investigate the role of human beings in resistance movements and climate justice.
Steve Shoffner: “Lookie Lou” is a seven second video loop derived from found film footage. Whereas the original film presented us with a man who snuck out to watch a adult show, “Lou” has been transformed into modern man, warped by excessive T.V. and media hype, and obsessed with violence, war and disaster.
Ian Trout and Kim Alexander: “Bits Of Me Were Dripping Off” Yet nothing is left but a hole. It is not a trick or a joke. It is an opportunity for the absorption of absence. It is the assertion of the individual’s unique ability to dig a hole like no one else.
Del Zamora and Juan Garza: “Closing Night @Club LA Lucha” With his wrestling and movie career now far behind him, El Luchador Chicano hangs on to the lime light in any way he can. Frayed wrestling mask still in place, he tends bar while simultaneously making it his own private stage. El Luchador Chicano is an entertainer, comedian, singer and sometimes philosopher. Are we witnessing a genius mind at work or an unbalanced soul who can no longer separate his invented persona from real life? By actor and performer Del Zamora and filmmaker Juan C. Garza.