Featuring work by Mauricio Abascal, Aja Albertson, Jenna Balfe, Jeremiah Clancy, Aiden Dillard, John Hancock, Patrick Hart, Adler Guerrier, Jay Hines,
Tomashi Jackson, Ali Prosch, Tao Rey, B. Rob E. Robertson, Charles Fambro, and Devin Smith.
Curated by Aja Albertson
Generously sponsored by Honor Roll Music
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PRESS RELEASE
Honor Roll Music, a full in-house music production company and record label, is proud to present, Of Sound and Vision, a group exhibition curated by resident artist Aja Albertson. The exhibition explores the relationship between visual and auditory art, whether that be music in its most literal form, or a manipulation perception of sound. Of Sound and Vision features drawing, collage, video, performance, photography, sculpture, and audio by the following artists: Mauricio Abascal, Aja Albertson, Jenna Balfe, Jeremiah Clancy, Charles Edward Fambro, Adler Guerrier, John Hancock, Patrick Hart, Jay Hines, Tomashi Jackson, Ali Prosch, Nicholas C. Raftis III, Tao Rey, B. Rob E. Robertson, Devon Smith, and Aiden Dillard.
Abascal will collaborate with Balfe to create a satyricalrecreation of a pop music video, while Albertson's sculpture is adorned with allusive bells. On display from Clancy, who is best known from his work with the band Fischer Spooner, are photographs that seem to roar with noise. Adler Guerrier, who's work was featured in the 2008 Whitney Biennial, will create a signature multi-media installation for the exhibition, as will Prosch, a Miami artist currently pursuing her masters degree at California Institute of The Arts. Graphiti artist Tao Rey unveils new sculpture, while Hines and Jackson create striking visual depictions
of noise with their works on paper. Hines will also be performing with collaborative partner, film maker Aiden Dillard. Yale Grad, Fambro, brings a loaded dialogue to the table with his new "sound scape", Sexual Apocolypse. Raftis III will be screening video with accompanied sound. The figurative icing-on-the-cake are Honor Roll Music's in-house composers, Hancock, Hart, Robertson, and Smith, who will open their studio doors to the public as they display new sonic and visual projects.
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IMAGES/ STATEMENTS
Aja Albertson
This Basel I decided to interview myself.
As I walk into my own studio on this rainy Monday, the advent of Advent, the air smells of cute dollar store incense. I pour some Bailey’s into my cool café con leche and settles down for some questions. In what style shall I ask these questions: Barbara Walters, Charlie Rose, Actor’s Studio, Matt Lauer? No.
AA: What do you do?
AA: I make mostly sculpture and drawing.
AA: What materials do you work with?
AA: I work with natural materials like bones, feathers, branches, crystals, shells, leather, preserved animals or insects. Contrarily, I rely on industrial strength adhesive.
AA: Do you ever think about ideas; you know, concepts?
AA: I address religion and politics a great deal, two subjects that are generally taboo in my everyday life. A huge part of my work revolves around earth worship, or in other words, “wicca”, and from there I’ve begun to illustrate alchemy as well. On the political tip, the French revolution is so romantic with all the filigree and beheadings. 1700’s French tapestry and illuminated manuscripts began to captivate my attention when I worked at the J. Paul Getty Museum in 2004/ 2005. I wanted to create a sculpture partly in homage to the technique of relief, but mainly I had to bring to life the magic depicted in the woven tapestries, and then to blur and reformulate certain aspects of the composition. For instance, what may in actuality be a bouquet of flowers, will shift into a golden fish.
AA: Well, great. Is there anything else that you want the public to know about your art?
AA: For more information, contact me at aja dot albertson at gmail dot com.
Awesome New Republic
John Hancock and B. Rob E. Robertson are more commonly known in collaborative spirit as Awesome New Republic. Their video piece is a tribute to the looping compositions of Steve Reich and a joke about the latest trends in underground band names. Additionally, John Hancock’s collages will be included in the artwork for the groups forthcoming album, Rational Geographic, available this spring on Honor Roll Music.
Jeremiah Clancy
Aiden Dillard
Aiden Dillard will be appearing as a Special Angel in his collaboration with Jay Hines titled, “Gospel” so that he may spread light to the decadent art world through a heavenly performance.
Charles Fambro
Artist Statement – Sexual Apocalypse
“Sexual Apocalypse.” Sounds weird. Some people thought it meant the end of sex. No. It refers to the strange culmination in some opaque, non-local, way of the abuse of sexual energy. It was an idea that hit me one night as I listened to the radio and heard story after story about the crumbling economy, corruption in business and government, violence and increasing militarization everywhere. The tone was barely subdued panic, and it was clear that plutonian change was imminent and unavoidable. Something seemed off though, as if the real cause was unidentified. How could illogic run so rampant that we are at the brink of total systemic meltdown?
My epiphany was that this total worldwide crisis was a result of the abuse of sexual energy, both consciously and unconsciously. I am unable to really put it into words and produce a clear explanation of this realization. Only James Baldwin, or perhaps Kathy Acker, among the writers I know, can really explicate the psycho-sexual connections and subterranean motivations to which I refer. What I tried to do was capture this epiphany with sound.Sexual slavery, child prostitution, child abuse in highand low places, sex in ads and propaganda, sexual aggression, torture and state sanctioned rape, and a seeming war on fecundity and the earth through chemicals and toxins, militarism and a recoiling from the social contract. Like a sinewy wraith these aberrant endeavors seem to entwine themselves in all of our institutions and communications.
For years I have been an avid reader of conspiracy lit. With truth being stranger than fiction why read novels? Within this body of literature one finds quite often, in both the corridors of corrupt power and the muddiest backwashes of true crime, roads that lead to sexual and child abuse, pornography, sexual slavery and human trafficking, and the whole panoply which is the obverse of Madison Avenue and Hollywood sexual enticement. Quite often these activities are bureaucratized in secret cabals and systems of communications. These associations often influence policies and decisions on institutional and hence societal levels. Kid you not.
But the sound collage that is SEXUAL APOCALYPSE attempts to incorporate that and much more. It is also sensuality, ancient fertility and marriage rites, sex as joy and healing and prosperity and humor and abundance. Gongs, frequencies, riddims, voices, breath, mon-atomic sounds, undiscovered House music, rips, tears, chains, skin on skin, the solar wind, electro-magnetic storms and alpha brainwaves...
It is a strange sound scape of the heavy and light vibrations which are the roller coaster ride of this changing moment.
PEACE
Charles Edward Fambro
Adler Guerrier
Jay Hines
Famous Quotes
From Werner Herzog and Jay Hines
“Life in the oceans must be sheer hell. A vast merciless hell of permanent and immediate danger. So much of a hell that during evolution some species- including man- crawled, fled onto some small continents of solid land, where the Lessons of Darkness continue.” -WH
“The drawings I make are like gospel, only with less talking. Gospel is like a band, except we never practice.” JH
“ Together, I said, we shall boil fire and stop fish.” -WH
“Ok.”
Tomashi Jackson
At this point in the development of my work I am interested in the ability of light sensitive materials to hold and in some cases preserve memory. I seek to make objects that are contemporary documents of recollection and future imagining while having unique relationships with light and the spaces they inhabit. Light discovers form and makes new form.
I am interested in the reclamation of bastardized materials that have outlived their primary usefulness. Shadows and materials become instruments to be played by space, time, and interaction. Tailfeather consists of fragmented imagery from my recent experiences in Central America. It is my intention that the body of the viewer becomes a player and the experience becomes new again and again.
Ali Prosch
Closed Curtain is a multi media artwork that consists of drawing and sound. The depiction of a Victorian themed waiting room with a partially painted red curtain is exhibited simultaneously with the sounds of heartbeats, fire, and a music box. With the combination of these elements the room is illustrated as a character itself, one that vacillates feelings of extreme anxiety and curiosity. Representing the psychological displacement that is commonly used with genres of horror. In this piece the sound and color are the artifice. Without these components the viewers perception of an ominous state would not be achieved. Closed Curtain exposes these devices of horror to further investigate human desires of fear and detachment and the pleasures thereof.
Tao Rey
Devin Smith
The earth is made of rocks. All kinds of rocks. Sure, you could say that there’s cities, oceans, people, animals, and all that other stuff. But when you get down to it, from a proportional standpoint, all that other stuff is like the skin layer of a fruit. Really the meat of the world is tons and tons of rocks. This sound installation is a generative piece for the sounds of rocks.