Upcoming
March Events at The Jewett Gallery
Deciphering Identity: Curated Exhibition
Opening Reception March 13th 6-8pm
Deciphering Identity attempts to confront and describe, through a diversity of perspectives, realities, and parameters that shape the individual identity. Pieces selected from the group show include multi-media works from undergraduate, graduate, and alumni. This collaborative exhibition includes work from, Massachusetts College of Art, The Art Institute of Boston, The School of the Museum of Fine Arts, and Wellesley College. Additionally, esteemed filmmaker Abigail Child, will be including one film short from her series, “The Suburban Trilogy. The Jewett Art Gallery will host a screening of Child’s entire trilogy on March 25th, as an extension of the exhibition.
Opening night includes a short audio/visual collaboration between, Berklee College of Music, and visual art students.
March 11th (Live Video/Sound Performance) (TBA)
Phil Niblock – http://www.phillniblock.com/
is a composer, filmmaker, videographer, and director of Experimental Intermedia, a foundation for avant-garde music based in New York with a parallel branch in Ghent, Belgium. He has worked with a range of musicians including: David Gibson, in the cello works of the 1970s); Petr Kotik,Susan Stenger, and Eberhard Blum, on Four Full Flutes; Rafael Toral, David First, Lee Ranaldo, Thurston Moore, Susan Stenger, and Robert Poss on Guitar Too, for Four(G2,44+1×2); Ulrich Krieger, Carol Robinson, Kaspar T. Toeplitz, and Reinhold Friedl, on Touch Food; and many others.
Unusually, even among the avant-garde composers of his generation, he has no formal musical training. He cites the musical activities of New York in the 1960s as a stimulus (and occasional memorable performances, such as the premiere of Morton Feldman’s Durations pieces). All his compositions are worked out intuitively rather than systematically.
Niblock’s music is an exploration of sound textures created by multiple tones in very dense, often atonal tunings (generally microtonal in conception) performed in long durations. The layering of long tones only very slightly distinct in pitch creates a multitude of beats and generates complex overtone patterns and other fascinating psychoacoustic effects. The combination of apparently static surface textures and extremely active harmonic movement generates a highly original music that, while having things in common with early drone-based Minimalism, is utterly distinct in sound and technique.
In performance, live musicians may play, wandering through the audience changing the sound texture through reinforcement of or interference with the existing tunings. Simultaneously, Niblock generally accompanies performances by presenting his films and videos (often those from the Movement of People Working series, or computer driven, black-and-white abstract images floating through time). These performances fall into two types: (1) an installation of several hours’ duration, with the music pieces played consecutively, with a long loop of several hours of work before repetition, and with multiple images that are shown simultaneously; or (2) a performance, with several simultaneous works of music and film, usually lasting between one and three hours. In these performances Niblock generally projects three (or more) film images simultaneously.
March 25th 7pm
Film Screening : Abigail Child’s THE SUBURBAN TRILOGY
(Abigail will be showing one film from this trilogy in the upcoming March show Deciphering
Identity)
Abigail Child – www.abigailchild.com
Film Synopsis: A feature-length project about girlhood and the immigrant
dream, focusing on post World War II North American suburbs and between
the war Europe, critically seen through the lens of gender, property and
myths of nation. —A rambunctious embrace, body to body, woman to
woman, entrance to exit—in-laws foregrounding the construction of cinematic
meaning, the elusive nature of memory and desire, the hysteric familial arena
of the social.
Bio: Abigail Child is a media artist and writer whose original montage pushes
the envelope of sound-image relations with sensitivity, smarts and passion. In
the words of LA Weekly, she makes “brilliant exciting work…a vibrant political
film that’s attentive to form.”
Her work in the 1980s explores gender while focusing on strategies for
rewriting narrative, creating the cult classics “Mayhem” and “Covert Action”
while her 1990s productions recuperate documentary to poetically explore
public space: B/SIDE (1996) and BELOW THE NEW (1999). In the 21st
century, her films DARK DARK (2001), SURFACE NOISE (2000), and digital
works CAKE + STEAK (2004) and THE FUTURE IS BEHIND YOU (2005)
investigate the awkward drama of everyday, often utilizing archival material
to examine the past.
Child has turned her vertical montage to installation, creating prismatic and
interruptive multiple screen narratives at galleries across the world. These
include The Walker Art Center, Minneapolis 2006; Radcliffe Institute, Harvard
University 2006; Wake Forest University Haynes Gallery 2009; the American
Academy in Rome 2010; Spazi Aperti at the Romanian Academy Rome: June
2010; and at the Complesso Monumentale di Santo Spirito in Sassia, Rome,
in The Road to Contemporary Art, 26-30 May 2010.
Child has had many solo shows with mid-career retrospectives: including
Braga Portugal (09), EXIS in Seoul Korea (08), Switzerland (08), Harvard
Cinematheque, (07), SF Yerba Buena Center in California (2000), in NYC at
Anthology Film Archives, in Boston at the Museum of Fine Arts, and most
recently at Reina Sofia, Madrid (June 2010) and Cinoteca, Sala Trevi, Rome
(Nov. 2010). Her award-winning art is exhibited in important group shows,
including The American Century, 1950-2000 at the Whitney Museum, Art at
the End of the Century 1980 -2000 at the Museum of Modern Art NY, and two
Whitney Biennials (1989 + 1997).
Her awards include a Rome Fellowship (2009-10); a Radcliffe Institute
Fellowship (05-06), a Ford Media Grant (05), a Guggenheim (95-96) and
Fulbright Fellowships (92-93). Her films are in the permanent collection of
The Museum of Modern Art, New York and the Centre Pompidou, Paris among
others, and Harvard University Cinematheque has created an Abigail Child
Collection dedicated to preserving and exhibiting her work.
Date: (TBA) (Live Video/Sound Performance)
Neil Leonard – http://www.neilleonard.com
A recipient of the 2013 Venice Biennial, Leonard is a prolific composer, performer, writer, and innovator in computer music and sound design, and his career in collaborating with high-caliber visual artists spans two decades. Leonard has created sound for installations at the Museum of Modern Art (New York), Whitney Museum of American Art, the Kitchen, the Seattle Art Museum, and Boston Museum of Fine Arts, and his compositions have been performed at Carnegie Hall, Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, Banff Festival for the Arts, and the International Computer Music Convention. He works also reside in the National Gallery of Canada and permanent exhibitions in Italy, and he has composed music for BBC TV and the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston.
Widely recognized as an expert in music for multimedia, he has lectured internationally, at such locations as: Centro para la Difusion de la Musica Contemporanea, Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, Spain; Conservatoria Nacional de Musica, Republica Dominicana; University of Puerto Rico, San Juan; Theremin Center at the Tchaikovsky Conservatory, Moscow, Russia. He has published more than thirty articles for American National Biography (Oxford University Press), Electronic Musician, Computer Music Journal, Green Linnet, and Sire Records, and he was a contributing author for the History Channel’s documentary on the Smithsonian’s Save Our Sounds project.
In his extensive performing career, he has performed with artists including the Boston Ballet, Hiram Bullock, Don Byron, Frank Lacy, Uri Caine, Orlando Cachaito Lopez (Buena Vista Social Club), John Medeski, Marvin “Smitty” Smith and a long list of others. His recordings appear on the ECM, and Accurate Records labels.
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