AC [ Institute Direct Chapel ] is pleased to present: Tone and Temperament: Live Transmission Thursday, June 25th, 7-9pm

AC [Institute Direct Chapel]
547 W. 27th St., 5th Floor

Tone and Temperament: Live Transmission
A Special Performance Event Featuring:
Barkus Born
Natalie Rose LeBrecht
Mike Wexler
[img]http://profile.ak.facebook.com/object3/211/5/n225481740376_5867.jpg[/img]

Thursday, June 25th, 7-9pm

This event is FREE and open to the public

About Tone and Temperament:

AC [ Institute Direct Chapel ] is pleased to present Tone and Temperament, a group-exhibition that considers the temporal and expandable material of sound. Curated by Sophie Landres and in collaboration with the eight participating artists, this exhibition concentrates on sound as a condition for personal, social, political and metaphysical experience. In addition to the permanent fixtures in the gallery, performances will be scheduled to occur throughout the duration of the exhibition.

Tone and Temperament was conceived as an opportunity to explore literal and conceptual ideas of harmony versus discordance and innocence versus criminality that subsist within the framework of conflicting social norms and art historical precedents. The exhibition was regarded as a conduit for inconclusive experiments in redistricting discursive boundaries and expanding aesthetic properties. Despite sound’s reflexive predilection for interference, the participants created pieces either in response to the exhibition site or with the ambition that their work could co-exist within spatial proximity, without jeopardizing individual content. Though many of the pieces violate prevailing notions of harmony and composition, the refusal to abide is a victimless crime, motivated by a congenial faith in plurality. Allowing sound to flow without bleeding or hemorrhaging, we hope to maintain numerous elements in a constellate connection, free to generate their own alliance of possible meanings.

About the Performers:

Barkus Born is a Brooklyn group that adopted it's name from a community in New Orleans that revels in the spirit of animals. For this show, they will perform an audio collage “Without Any Purpose" loosely based on the scientific research of Dr. Peter Witt from 1954. In order to visualize the effects of different kinds of drugs, Austrian pharmacist Dr. Witt drenched flies in these drugs and fed them to spiders. The narcotics influenced various parts of their nervous systems and caused a difference in the 'spin' results. The effects on behavior are visualized in each individual web, as the photographs he took clearly document. In most cases, the web can no longer perform its initial function. Some webs lose their sense of systematic structure, they are a chaos of holes, knots and asymmetric lines of confusion. Others miss all cross-connections, but form star-shaped compositions without any purpose.

New York City based Natalie Rose LeBrecht began performing and recording music in 1996. She is a multi-instrumentalist most known for her dynamic vocal abilities and intense performance style. She has a BFA in Intermedia Art from the University of Iowa and has been awarded a Roulette/Jerome Foundation Commission for New Experimental Music. Natalie has been featured on several radio stations globally, including WNYC and WFMU, and has performed in several cities internationally. For this event, Natalie will perform a vocal-based piece, working with the ideas of shapeshifting, transmutation and evolution.

Mike Wexler is a self-taught guitarist and singer whose long-form songs incorporate extended instrumental fingerstyle guitar passages, a post-lyric lyrical sensibility and the desire to reconcile the demands of song structure to those of contemporary investigations into the nature of acoustic phenomena à la the spectral school of composition. His musical inquiries probe the progression, the drone, the single tone as a complex of sounds―in short, to make use of the tension between harmonic movement and stasis as something more than an equilibrium. Wexler also draws inspiration from songwriting auteurs past and present who bring to bear the influence of forward looking musicians and writers on their work (Scott Walker, Robert Wyatt and Annette Peacock spring to mind as spiritually kindred, although not particularly apt as comparisons).



About AC [ Institute Direct Chapel ]:

AC’s mission is to advance the understanding of art through investigation, research and education. It is a lab and forum for experimentation and critical discussion. We support and develop projects that explore a performative exchange across visual, verbal and experiential disciplines. We encourage critical writing that challenges conventional expectations of meaning and objectivity as well as the boundaries between the rational and subjective.

Art Currents is a non-profit 501©3.

AC [ Institute Direct Chapel ]
547 W. 27th St, 5th Floor - #519, 529 and North Alcove
New York, NY 10001
www.artcurrents.org / email: [email protected]
Gallery Hours: Wed., Fri. & Sat.: 1-6pm, Thurs.: 1-8pm