In a new collaborative work titled /e-media-c\, three artists, Raphaele Shirley, David Watson and Peter Zummo, perform with the physicality of sound, light and time. The live work is set in the bracketed space of two mirrored parabolic disks. The large rotating parabolics function as set and sculpture as well as lo-fi speakers and projectors. With the parabolics as the fulcrum and the artist’s respective instruments as levers, Shirley, Watson and Zummo move space with percussive light and looping harmonics that leap across the performance hall. They shift sound and light in thick resonance within an economy of means. Each artist performs with basic tools: bagpipes for David Watson, a trombone for Peter Zummo and light for Raphaele Shirley. Using analogue approaches to media and in the lineage of La Monte Young, John Cage, Robert Irwin and Elaine Summers, the trio seeks experimentation and unpredictability.
LOCATION: Hunter College
Black Box 5th floor, Hunter North Building
Enter at 69th Street between Lexington & Park Avenues
May 7th 2018 – TIME 7 pm
Produced by Harvestworks in partnership with the Integrated Media Arts MFA at Hunter College.
A satellite event of Creative Tech Week 2018
/e-media-c\
“Minimalism plus a whole lot more” P. Zummo
resonance, response, reflection.
A long-held note bounces off the underside of bridge at night. A beam of white light pans across worn wood floor. A Jazz melody starts then abruptly stops. A glint of light crosses the brass of the bell. Headlights pan back then forth. A man lifts horn from hip to head. A woman turns on heal with flashlight in hand.
There is something so very focused in the way sound and light start, bend and end. It is, as they like to say, in the moment.
In a new collaborative work titled /e-media-c\, three artists, Raphaele Shirley, David Watson and Peter Zummo, perform with the physicality of sound, light and time. The live work is set in the bracketed space of two mirrored parabolic disks. The large rotating parabolics function as set and sculpture as well as lo-fi speakers and projectors. With the parabolics as the fulcrum and the artist’s respective instruments as levers, Shirley, Watson and Zummo move space with percussive light and looping harmonics that leap across the performance hall. They shift sound and light in thick resonance within an economy of means. Each artist performs with basic tools: bagpipes for David Watson, a trombone for Peter Zummo and light for Raphaele Shirley. Using analogue approaches to media and in the lineage of La Monte Young, John Cage, Robert Irwin, and Elaine Summers, the trio seeks experimentation and unpredictability.
/e-media-c\’s progressive arc spans from silence to fullness, from a minimalist exploration to a maximalist explosion of sounds and visuals.
Raphaele Shirley (born 1969) is a french/american visual artist working in NYC. Employing diverse mediums such as neon, LED, laser, water – mist, sound, and occasional pyrotechnics as well as more traditional materials such as wood, metal and paint she creates sculptures and site specific environments which play on the tension between ephemerality and permanence, and explore the power of simple direct communication devoid of artifice or staging, letting the materials themselves be the carrier of meaning. She has shown her work nationally and internationally. She has received several grants from the Norwegian Arts Council and was artist in residence at Harvestworks 2016 with the collaborative project 3by3by3 (with collaborators Rhys Chatham and Gh Hovagimyan) as well as the Arctic Circle (2009 and 2010)
David Watson (born 1960) Originally from New Zealand, David Watson is an experimental musician who has lived in New York since 1987. He generally performs as a guitarist, or as a highland bagpiper. Watson has a long-standing project with Lee Ranaldo, he has recorded with Christian Marclay, Ikue Mori, Chris Mann, John Zorn and many others. He has released work on XI, Avant, Tzadik, Braille, Doctor Jim’s, Le Station Radar, FMR, Three Lobed, Circulasione, Grapefruit and the Cafe Oto label. He has scored music for dance (recently for Moriah Evans), for films (Martin Lucas “Hiroshima Bound”,) directed music-theater (“The Inquisitive Musician” at The Stedlijk Museum) and has an ongoing project using the procession tradition. Watson also curates the experimental music series WOrK ØØ.
Peter Zummo (born 1948) is an American composer and trombonist. He has been described as “an important exponent of the American contemporary classical tradition.” Meanwhile, he has been quoted as describing his own work as “Minimalism plus a whole lot more.” Since 1967, Zummo’s compositions exploring the rock, jazz, new- and electronic-music, disco, punk, and world-music idioms have been presented in venues including the Brooklyn Academy of Music, New York City Center, Experimental Intermedia Foundation, Dance Theater Workshop, and La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club, among many others in New York City, as well as in numerous additional spaces worldwide. The website of the music magazine Pitchfork called Zummo’s music “the sound of sublimity…that sends shivers down the nervous system,” and in an interview with The Quietus, Scottish deejay JD Twitch (Keith McIvor) characterized Zummo’s work as “sheer bliss.
• Links
INTERVIEWS AND PRESS COVERAGE
PRESS QUOTES
About David Watson’s solo CD “Throats” the Downtown Music Gallery wrote “the bagpipes shimmer as different lines pile up like an old Terry Riley piece, hypnotically repeating while slowly shifting in pitch.”
The website of the music magazine Pitchfork called Peter Zummo’s music “the sound of sublimity…that sends shivers down the nervous system,”
Brooklyn Magazine’s Paul D’Agustino wrote of Raphaele Shirley’s recent installation at the Chimney “It’s a fantastically suggestive, transportive intervention..”
• Collaborators
Raphaele Shirley
Peter Zummo
David Watson
