If all went as planned at PICA's annual Tada! benefit last night, the lineup for 2009's Time-Based Art festival was announced. I wasn't there, but I did receive a handy press release detailing the lineup, which I will post after the jump.
This year, Cathy Edwards replaces Mark Russell as guest artistic director—she'll curate the '09 and '10 festivals. I spoke with Edwards via conference call a few weeks ago, and came away from the conversation impressed with how grounded and specific her curatorial vision is. Russell, in conversation prior to last year's festival, told me that he wouldn't know what the festival's "themes" were until after it was over—and if any theme did emerge from TBA:08, it was a preoccupation with the nature of performance, and the relationship between audience and performer. Great, if you're into that, but definitely vulnerable to the type of criticism lobbed by Mike Daisey during his now-infamous Works performance last year, when he railed against navel-gazing, solipsistic performance art. By contrast, Edwards says that TBA:09 has "startlingly visible" themes, foremost among them being technology-related anxieties relating to loss of privacy and the changing nature of interpersonal connection (the phrase "examining the nature of spectacle" wasn't uttered once!).
As far as I know, the location of the Works has yet to be determined, though there was talk of trying once again to find a venue to house both the works and the festival's visual art programming. (Disjecta?)
Collaborating organizations include LAIKA/house, Cinema Project, and the Slow Food Movement—there's talk of a Labor Day Picnic in conjunction with the latter.
Honestly, I'm really excited about this year's lineup. Take a peek after the jump.
FESTIVAL INFORMATION
2009 Time-Based Art Festival (TBA:09)
September 3 — 13, 2009, visual exhibitions and installations through October, 2009
TBA:09 FESTIVAL ARTISTS
Performance
Amyo/tinyrage, Back to Back Theatre, Erik Friedlander, Miguel Gutierrez and the Powerful People, Maria Hassabi, Raimund Hoghe, Young Jean Lee, locust, Pan Pan Theatre, Meg Stuart/Damaged Goods with Philipp Gehmacher/Mumbling Fish
Visual
Robert Boyd, Antoine Catala, Brody Condon, Sharon Hayes, Jesse Hayward, Johanna Ketola, Fawn Kreiger, Kalup Linzy, Ma Qiusha, robbinschilds + A.L. Steiner, Ethan Rose, Stephen Slappe
Special Labor Day Event
Slow Food Movement
Film/Performance
Daniel Barrow, Hitoshi Toyoda, Tyler Wallace + Nicole Dill
Lectures
Danielle Goldman, Peter Kreider
Additional Festival Information and TBA:09 Artist project titles and bios continued below.
Time-Based Art Festival
With an opening weekend that coincides with Labor Day weekend, PICA presents a Festival that bridges disciplines and geography with morning workshops, daytime installations, noontime lectures, afternoon salons, evening performances, outdoor happenings, and no shortage of late night activity at THE WORKS. Contemporary masters and significant emerging artists mix and mingle in a true immersion in the art of our time.
TBA:09 marks the first under PICA’s newest Guest Artistic Director Cathy Edwards. Ms. Edwards comes to Portland formerly as Artistic Director of Dance Theater Workshop (DTW) in New York and currently as the Director of Programming for the International Festival of Arts & Ideas in New Haven, CT. While at DTW, Ms. Edwards was recognized by The New York Times for supporting “provocative, experimental choreographers,” and for “daring curatorial choices [that] showed her to be as creative and imaginative as many of the artists she booked.”
She joins with PICA’s Performing Arts Program Director Erin Boberg Doughton and Visual Art Program Director Kristan Kennedy in programming a Festival that crosses genres, explores voices, and generates a deepening of artistic and cultural dialogue. Presented in a variety of theatres, cabarets, black boxes, music halls, industrial warehouses and galleries throughout Portland’s Central Eastside, Downtown Portland and the Pearl District, TBA:09 is a culmination of new work created by artists in residence, international artists, emerging new performers, and expansive work from the burgeoning Pacific Northwest. In addition, all TBA artists actively participate in our educational outreach program of salons, lectures and workshops, called the TBA Institute.
TBA Institute
Go behind the scenes to find out how and why artists do what they do. Through a daily program of artist talks, workshops and lectures, the TBA Institute provides a platform of greater context and connection in a dialogue of exchange between TBA Artists and audiences.
Education & Outreach is a central element of PICA’s mission and strengthens PICA’s position in the local, regional and national arts community as a presenter of consequence and diversity.
THE WORKS
TBA’s late-night cabaret/theatre/bar/see-and-be-seen hub, THE WORKS, presents a special lineup of artists as they dive into music, theatre, performance and who-knows-what-else well into the wee hours. Mingle with TBA Artists and audiences, nosh on tasty bites, and imbibe thirst quenching beverages—THE WORKS is the place to be each and every night of TBA. Program offerings run the gamut from electro/acoustic to hip-hop, pop, punk, cabaret, and everything in between. Artists to date include: Rush N Disco, Kalup Linzy with the Ben Darwish Trio, robbinschilds and the return of the popular Ten Tiny Dances and tiny tba.
Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (PICA)
PICA is about the activity generated by a community using its energy. Since 1995, we have been committed to presenting diverse works by artists in various disciplines from all over the world. PICA develops exhibitions and residencies, stimulates conversation, commissions new work and encourages the simmering of new ideas.
2009 TIME-BASED ART FESTIVAL ARTIST LINEUP
Performance
Amyo/tinyrage / too (Seattle) Dance
www.tinyrage.com/projects/
too is a dance/video performance and is the product of two and a half years of filming duets with 50 different people; shooting locations span six US states and three cities in Japan. too follows the fragmented and dreamlike events of two dancers (Amy O’Neal and Ellie Sandstrom) who encounter 50 other people duet style, but manage to miss each other while environments and people constantly change. O’Neal has danced with Sandstrom, in other people’s productions and in O’Neal’s own choreographic work over the past 10 years.
Back to Back Theatre / Small Metal Objects (Australia) Theatre
www.backtobacktheatre.com
Small Metal Objects unfolds amid real pedestrian traffic in a specially sited environment, the plot unbeknownst to passers-by. On raised seating with individual sets of headphones, the audience is wired into an intensely personal drama as Gary and Steve, the kind of men who normally escape notice, play an inadvertent but pivotal role in an arranged drug transaction. Back to Back Theatre creates new forms of contemporary theatre imagined from the minds and experiences of a unique ensemble of actors with disabilities, giving voice to social and political issues that speak to all people. Based in Geelong, Australia, the company makes work locally and tours globally. Small Metal Objects has received a “Bessie” New York Dance and Performance Award (2008), the Green Room Award (UK) for Best Theatre Production (2007) and the ZKB Appreciation Prize (Switzerland) for Extraordinary Achievement (2007).
Erik Friedlander / Block Ice and Propane (New York) Music
www.erikfriedlander.com
A premier avant-garde cellist, Erik Friedlander plays a concert of idiosyncratic American roots music, creating a loose and meditative sound in which he uses his fingers as often as he uses the cello bow. Block Ice & Propane is a collection of solo cello tunes that evoke images of truck-stops, long, lonely highways, and stark panoramas. Lyrical, plain-spoken, and emotional, the project was inspired by memories of summers he spent as a child crossing the U.S. in a station wagon while his father Lee Friedlander photographed an American landscape both elegiac and workaday. Images from these trips and spoken stories from his father accompany Erik’s stirring piece. Erik Friedlander is an improviser and a composer who is a veteran of New York City’s downtown music world and has played with John Zorn, Laurie Anderson and Courtney Love.
Block Ice & Propane is made possible by an American Masterpieces grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Miguel Gutierrez and the Powerful People / Last Meadow (New York) Dance
www.miguelgutierrez.org
Last Meadow mines movements and texts from James Dean’s three films to create a non-narrative patchwork that describes an America where the jig is up and the dream has died. The piece exploits the iconic and inherently misunderstood image of James Dean as a symbol of the ways in which we project unrealistic and outsized expectations onto each other and onto our identity as a nation. Performance artist and TBA Alum Neal Medlyn is creating music for Last Meadow and visual artist Paul Chan will serve as dramaturg. Gutierrez’s work has been presented both nationally at Dance Theater Workshop and The Kitchen and internationally in festivals such as ImPuls Tanz in Vienna and Springdance Festival in Utrecht. Gutierrez has received Creative Capital and MAP Fund support for his work, and won a Bessie New York Dance and Performance Award for his piece Retrospective Exhibitionist and Difficult Bodies in 2006.
Last Meadow will have its world premiere at TBA:09 and is a co-commissioned project by PICA, Dance Theater Workshop, and the Flynn Center for the Arts.
Maria Hassabi / SOLO SHOW 1 and SOLO SHOW 2 (Cyprus/New York) Dance
www.mariahassabi.com
Maria Hassabi—who performed at TBA:04 with ChameckiLerner—brings to Portland her own new performance examining iconic feminine images from popular culture, art and film. In part one, the piece explores solitude, domesticity and the unglamorous nature of being home alone; in part two, the solo performer morphs into a star and a chosen one, a celebrity in complete control of her glamour. Hassabi’s work utilizes extreme physicality and aesthetic precision to create urban worlds filled with iconic images. Her creations place themselves within the tense juncture of dance, performance art and installation. Maria Hassabi received a Foundation for Contemporary Performance award in 2008 and has performed in New York City at venues such as Dance Theater Workshop, P.S. 122 and The Kitchen, as well as in Europe at ImpulsTanz Vienna and throughout Cyprus, Greece and Portugal.
This is a world premiere performance for TBA:09 of this new project and is co-commissioned by PICA, FIAF/Crossing the Line Festival, National Performance Network and PERFORMA.
Raimund Hoghe / Bolero Variations (Germany) Dance
www.raimundhoghe.com
Raimund Hoghe, a German choreographer, writer and for a decade dramaturg for Pina Bausch, explores ritual and minimalism in his performances, often drawing inspiration from well-known and archetypal pieces of music, in this case Maurice Ravel’s Bolero. Instead of relying on the crescendo of the Ravel music to set the tone of the piece, he cycles through different examples of the bolero, from Eydie Gormé & Trio Los Panchos to Maria Callas to Benny Goodman to Tchaikovsky. He includes several interpretations of Ravel’s Bolero, including a sound recording from the famous Torvill and Dean ice-dancing performance at the 1984 Olympics in Sarajevo (commentator remarks included—“Here comes the triple lutz!”). Hoghe, whose own physical difference is often an undercurrent to his choreography, explores physical and musical rituals with patience and an almost liturgical respect. Hoghe’s books have been translated into several languages and he has presented his performances all over Europe, as well as in Japan and Australia. He received the French Prix de la Critique in 2006 for Swan Lake, 4 Acts and the magazine Ballet-Tanz named him Dancer of the Year for 2008.
TBA:09 marks the U.S. premiere for Raimund Hoghe’s company.
Young Jean Lee / The Shipment (New York) Theatre
www.youngjeanlee.org
The Shipment is the newest theater project by TBA:07 Artist Young Jean Lee. Lee is known for her brazen theatrical inventiveness, and The Shipment applies her signature style and acid wit to the black experience in America. In collaboration with an all-black cast, Lee has created a three-part theatre piece that is provocative, terrifyingly astute, and scabrously funny. The title is based on a rap song that is about a shipment of drugs but that also evokes the African slave trade. Lee’s work has been presented in New York City at the Public Theater, HERE Art Center, the Soho Rep and The Kitchen, around the U.S. at the Wexner Center for the Arts (OH), the Walker Art Center (MN), On the Boards (WA), and has toured around the world to venues such as Kaaitheater (Brussels), Hebbel Theater (Berlin) and the Vienna Festival.
The Shipment will make its West Coast premiere at TBA:09.
locust / Crushed (Seattle) Dance
www.locustsucka.com
Crushed is a dance/music/video performance work dealing with the idea of being blindsided. Dancers sing and musicians dance in this feverishly physical dissection of cause and effect. TBA:05 Alum locust returns to Portland with choreographer Amy O’Neal to present this very visceral and exciting new work.
Pan Pan Theatre / Crumb Trail (Ireland) Theatre, Dance
www.panpantheatre.com
A deconstructed version of Hansel and Gretel, this experimental multi-media theatre piece addresses the anxiety inherent in serving up private lives for public consumption in the internet age. Wickedly funny and densely theatrical, Crumb Trail takes on everything from parent-child relationships to internet predators to the self-aware construction of our own identities. Replete with existential uncertainty and musical interludes, Crumb Trail is a beautifully complex and fast-paced piece of theatre for our time. Pan Pan, established in 1993, creates original work through commissioning new writing and through the totally unique expression of established writings. Based in Ireland, the company tours nationally and internationally and has performed throughout Europe, Canada, Korea, Australia, China, and the United States.
Crumb Trail will make its West Coast premiere at TBA:09.
Meg Stuart/Damaged Goods with Philipp Gehmacher/Mumbling Fish / Maybe Forever (Brussels, Belgium) Dance
www.damagedgoods.be
Vampires struggle with eternity and loneliness. Human beings struggle with each other and with the fact that things are not forever. Everyone struggles with something, and fortunately there are songs that make us feel better about it all. Choreographers Meg Stuart and Philipp Gehmacher let their artistic worlds bleed into one another as they embody the demise of a relationship in Maybe Forever. Brussels-based composer/musician Niko Hafkenscheid joins them on stage, inviting them to waltz to lullabies and into promised lands. But under the velvet surface of sweet melancholy simmers the unexpressed and the embryonic. Stuart received the Flemish Culture Award 2008 and Meg Stuart/Damaged Goods have been artists in residence at the Kaaitheater (Brussels), the Schauspielhaus Zurich, and the Volksbuhne am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz in Berlin. Stuart is known for her collaborations with other artists, including visual artist Ann Hamilton and media artist Gary Hill.
Influential dance artist Meg Stuart—an American artist living between Brussels and Berlin—makes a rare U.S. appearance with this West Coast premiere.
The following Visual Art exhibitions and installations will be on view through October, 2009. Admission to the Visual Art program is FREE.
Robert Boyd / Tomorrow People (New York) Video Installation
www.robertboyd.info
Tomorrow People is a synchronized two-channel video installation. The piece addresses issues of social paranoia and civil distrust in an era of questionable politics using excerpts from syndicated radio talk show hosts, international conspiracists, amateur documentary filmmakers, and the mysterious Commander X. Boyd represents a history of apocalyptic thought as a series of MTV-style music videos within a setting reminiscent of a discotheque.
Working in the areas of video, installation, photography, and sculpture, Robert Boyd culls imagery from Internet news clips, television cartoons, vintage documentary films, and archival footage of doomsday cults, iconic political figures and global fundamentalist movements. Contrasting the familiar and the fringe along with the popular and the notorious, Boyd’s work suggests a displacement between the euphoric idyll promised by disco and the chilling reality of collective human brutality.
His work has been widely exhibited at venues such as the Sundance Film Festival, Park City, Utah; The Indianapolis Museum of Contemporary Art, Indianapolis; 303 Gallery, New York; Wesleyan University, Middletown, Connecticut; Artsonje Center, Seoul; Context Galleries, Derry; The Hospital, London; PKM Gallery, Beijing; Kunst-Werke, Berlin; Palacio de Bellas Artes, Mexico City; Participant Inc, New York; Centre de Cultura Contemporània, Barcelona; White Box, New York; Galerie Chez Valentin, Paris; Smart Project Space, Amsterdam; The Islip Art Museum, Islip, New York; and Momenta Art, Brooklyn, New York. His work is included in numerous private and public collections including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York.
Antoine Catala / (France + New York) Video Installation
www.aaaaaaa.org
Exploring video compression technologies, Antoine Catala utilizes distortion effects to create video installations that enlighten the medium’s very own snags and glitches. In his digital diptychs, he enhances imperfections, renders errors, and highlights other visual malformations to generate complex faceted figures. In rethinking portraiture, he delivers haunted digital composites that move the face across the screen in halting, often painful transmutations of subjectivity. Developing a technique that distorts movement in its continuity, Catala has created a method for inputting data, and outputting distortion, a practice through which he becomes vulnerable to the technology he is manipulating.
His practice includes performance-based works and curating as a medium. A New York-based French artist, Antoine was schooled in Sonic and Fine Arts at Middlesex and London Guildhall Universities in London. His work has been exhibited in Los Angeles, Mexico, and the UK.
Brody Condon / Without Sun (New York) Video, Performance
www.tmpspace.com
Named after the classic Chris Marker video Sans Soliel, Brody Condon’s Without Sun is a 15-minute compilation of found internet video clips. Utilizing footage of teens experiencing the legal psychedelic drug Salvia divinorum, the sounds and images overlapping, Brody creates a pseudo-narrative utilizing focused on the exterior surface of the "projection of self" into visionary worlds. The clips, posted to YouTube and available worldwide, demonstrate the gap between lived experience of transcendental aims with its representation. For TBA:09 the piece will be installed as video and will also be staged as a live performance, acted out in word and movement by a local dancer and actor selected by the artist.
Condon was born in Mexico and received his MFA from the University of California, San Diego in 2002. His education includes residencies at Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten in 2004 and Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2001. He has participated in exhibitions at galleries, cultural institutions, and event spaces internationally such as the 2004 Whitney Biennial, Pace Wildenstein Gallery and New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York, the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Santa Monica Museum of Art and Machine Project in California, the Mattress Factory in Pittsburgh, Kunst-werke in Berlin, and the Stedelijk Museum Post CS and Sonsbeek 2008 International Public Sculpture Exhibition in the Netherlands.
Sharon Hayes / (New York) Video, Performance
www.shaze.info
Blurring the lines between social intervention, political activism, and public spectacle, Hayes utilizes video, performance, and installation to orchestrate and document collective activity in the public domain. Informed by theater, film, anthropology, linguistics, and journalism, her work investigates the relationship between history, politics, and speech and the process of individual and collective subject formation.
Hayes’ installation, video and performance work has been shown at P.S. 1 Museum of Contemporary Art, Andrew Kreps Gallery, Parlour Projects, the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Independent Study Program, Dance Theater Workshop, Dixon Place, HERE, Performance Space 122, and the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York and at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions. In addition she has shown in galleries, exhibition or performance spaces in Bogotá, Berlin, Copenhagen, Malmö, Vienna and Zagreb as well as in California, Florida, Rhode Island, Texas, and Vermont, and in 45 lesbian living rooms across the United States. Hayes is represented by Tanya Leighton Gallery, Berlin.
For TBA:09 Hayes will develop a new site specific piece which comments on the politics of love.
Jesse Hayward / (Portland, OR) Sculpture, Installation — PICA COMMISSION
www.jessehayward.com
Utilizing accumulation, repetition, and ritual, Jesse Hayward creates amorphous armatures out of canvas, plastic, metal, foam, or wood. These assembled forms are covered in ink, raw pigment, and glitter, softening and obscuring the original structure. Resulting in an uncanny use of color, space, and form that re-contextualizes the relationship between painterly and sculptural forms, his work often achieves a heightened sense of balanced chaos and foreshadows the instability and immateriality of future outcomes. The sculptural commingles with the painterly and the drawn, articulating a space wherein boundaries are blurred and the rhythms of color and form create new interpretations of our sacred beliefs and natural environments. Although Hayward engages the basic tropes of art-making, what finally emerges is something alien. The objects exist in a state of diminished hybridization, with multiple genres parasitically collapsing one another.
Jesse Hayward received his MFA from California College of Art in 2002. His work has been exhibited at PDX Contemporary Art Window Project in Portland, OR, Southern Exposure in San Francisco, CA, and The Affair at The Jupiter Hotel Art Fair, among others. In 2006 Hayward's work was included in the Oregon Biennial at the Portland Art Museum. His work has been reviewed in The Oregonian, PORT, PDX Magazine, Willamette Week, and the Portland Mercury. Most recently, Hayward was short listed for the Portland Art Museum's Contemporary Northwest Art Award.
Johanna Ketola / The Walls Of My Hall (Finland) Video Installation
The Walls Of My Hall is a multi channel video installation, which refers to the human body as a place to exist, a structure, related to its built environment. The work happens in "selected reality" as bodies are at rest and suspended in motion, the surroundings that they inhabit and the furniture they sit upon is radically removed. Stark black, empty spaces still reflect what was once there- what has been erased. An audio soundtrack of live radio broadcast is pumped into the spaces by small radios, an echo of the present world colliding with these frozen people. Although dark and eerie, the piece also reflects a certain sense of humor, a moment of hope that we carry on even when we are represented in real or fictionalized space that is void of support.
Working in video and photography, Finnish artist Johanna Ketola reconstructs narrative that is built upon her quotidian observations of every day life. This results in both fictional and autobiographical characters and stories, which often reflect her state of being as affected by a kind of sweet and absurd hopefulness about the human condition. Her work has been exhibited at Gallery Jangva in Helsinki, Finland and Oulun City Art Museum in Oulun, Finland.
Ketola’s presentation at TBA:09 will be her United States debut.
Fawn Krieger / (New York) Installation, Video — PICA RESIDENCY + COMMISSION
Krieger will construct a national park as stageset. The structure takes its cues from UNESCO World Heritage sites, Lewis & Clark expeditions, museum dioramas, the Hudson River School, Superstudio, and America’s post-war middle-class touristic pastime, the Cross Country trip. Inspired by the artist’s own family cross-country trip in 1984, she presents us with an inside-out, indoor landscape—a built environment that asks which of our natures are not made? The sprawling plateau of faded and fleshy territories includes plush, upholstered hills, craggy cement valleys, and cliffs of fragmented cabinetry. With each modeled region, the “untouched” is retouched.
Fawn Krieger is a NY-based artist, born in 1975, whose multi-genre works re-imagine everyday sites like the shop and home. Her “stages” are inhabitable sculptures that transform spectators into participants, and examine the politics of ownership and exchange. Krieger’s Flintstonian tactility, and penchant for scale compressions, unfolds an unlikely collision of private and public space, where intimate moments also serve as social ruptures. She received her BFA from Parsons School of Design, and her MFA from Bard College’s Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts. Her work has been exhibited at The Kitchen (NY), Art in General (NY), Nice & Fit Gallery (Berlin), The Moore Space (Miami), Von Lintel Gallery (NY), the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University (Boston), and Neon>fdv (Milan). Krieger is the recipient of grants from Art Matters Foundation (2008) and the Jerome Foundation (2007), and currently teaches at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Molloy College.
This project is made possible in part by a grant from the National Performance Network's Visual Artists Network. Major contributors are the Andy Warhol Foundation for Visual Arts, the Joan Mitchell Foundation, and the Nathan Cummings Foundation. www.npnweb.org
Kalup Linzy / (New York) Video, Performance — PICA RESIDENCY
www.kaluplinzy.net
Acting as director-actor and singer-songwriter, New York-based Kalup Linzy draws on a variety of American pop- and counter-culture genres, including soap operas and early video and performance art. Creating melancholic video narratives that are often frantic and schizophrenic, his storylines mime traditional melodramas while satirizing the medium. Routinely dressed in drag and often lip-synching to Kalup’s wildly manipulated prerecorded vocal tracks, the characters interact to uncover the shrewd home truths about race, class, sex, love, family and stereotyping.
Kalup Linzy was born in Stuckey, Florida and graduated from the MFA program at the University of South Florida in 2003. He attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2005. Linzy’s work has been exhibited internationally, his work is currently on view in a massive one person exhibition at the Studio Museum of Harlem and he was recently featured in Prospect One in New Orleans. He is a recipient of a grant from the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation, and was named a Guggenheim fellow in 2007. In 2008 he received a Creative Capital Grant and a fellowship from the Jerome Foundation. His work has been reviewed in The New York Times, Art in America, and Artforum.
Ma Qiusha / From No.4 Pingyuanli to No.4 Tianqiaobeili (Beijing, China) Video
www.maqiusha.com
Ma Qiusha presents her diaristic video No.4 Pingyuanli to No.4 Tianqiaobeili a simple confessional, which explores the artists’ conflict with both parental and societal pressures to be successful. Holding a razorblade on her tongue the artist tells short stories about her life as a young artist, she describes being compelled to strive for perfection, when her female sex has already been deemed “less—than.” She talks about for love and affection companionship and understanding while living life as one of the millions of China’s “only children”. She wonders about her parent’s approval and worries about her value to society as an artist and a daughter. Her speech is muddled and stunted by the cutting blade. The video is both psychological portrait and a performance document.
Ma is a young Chinese artist recently featured in REFRESH : Emerging Chinese Artists at the Zendai Moma, Shanghai, China. 1982 Born in Beijing, China. 2005 Graduated from Digital Media studio of The Central Academy of Fine Arts. Beijing, China. Now Living And Working In Beijing, China. Group exhibitions: 2006 35th International Film Festival Rotterdam, Rotterdam, Netherlands 2005 Rumor Décor, Ddmwarehouse, Shanghai, China 2005 Beijing Documenta - Producing HIGH, Beijing, China 2005 A Cartoon, Taikang Top Space, Beijing, China 2005 920 Kilograms, Shanghai Duolun Museum of Modern Art. Shanghai, China 2005 Archaeology of the Future: the Second Triennial of Chinese Art. Nanjing Museum, Nanjing, China 2005 "Experience and Consciousness-The New Vision Media Festival". Beijing film academy, Beijing, China 2004 Automat Contemporary Art Exhibition, Suzhou Art & Design Technology Institute. Suzhou, China 2004 SCARIFY— China Present Independent Video Exhibition. Beijing, China 2004 The 3rd Changsha Contemporary Art Exhibition. Changsha.
robbinschilds + A.L. Steiner / C.L.U.E. (New York) Performance/Installation
www.robbinschilds.com
C.L.U.E. (color location ultimate experience) is a collaboration between artists A.L. Steiner and robbinschilds (Layla Childs and Sonya Robbins), AJ Blandford, and Kinski. Like a living organism, C.L.U.E. adapts to the space it temporarily occupies. In this manifestation, it will take the form of site-specific performance, multichannel video installation, and video projection. The flexible nature of this project embraces multiple arrangements of its parts, allowing the environment to inform its presentation. Shifting shape while generating new elements is essential for C.L.U.E. and enables it to continually evolve, remaining a work permanently in progress.
In the process of making their work, the artists visit locales ranging from desolate desert landscapes to darkened parking lots, responding to the environment and capturing the results of these interactions. The subsequent videos are choreographed patterns, crafted through the use of carefully timed jump cuts that divide the piece into discrete, color-coded sections.
robbinschilds was formed by Sonya Robbins and Layla Childs in 2003. The company presents highly visual time-based works that explore the intersection between architecture and human movement. In addition to their live work, robbinschilds’ video art has been exhibited at Reina Sofia Museum, Madrid, Spain (September 2007), Taxter and Spengemann gallery (March 2007), LACE: Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, (February 2007) and was screened as part of the BAM Next Wave series. robbinschilds has worked with the art collective Chicks on Speed, choreographing the group’s 30-minute video piece Visitors, which premiered at the Deitch Gallery in April of 2005, and has collaborated with Japanther on a rock opera that will premiere in November at the Performa 09 festival in New York City. robbinschilds premiered C.L.U.E. at P.S.122., the piece was adapted for the New Museum in New York in 2008.
A.L. Steiner was born and raised in Miami, FL. Her photo & video work has been published and exhibited internationally since 1997, most recently at Moda Fad (Barcelona), Starship (Berlin) and New Langton Arts (San Francisco). Steiner collaborated with Chicks on Speed, Nicole Eisenman on the publication Ridykeulous (Summer 2005). A.L. Steiner is represented by Taxter and Spengemann in New York.
Ethan Rose / Movements (Portland, OR) Installation
www.ethanrosemusic.com
Movements, Ethan Rose's latest sound installation, consists of over one hundred altered music boxes carefully timed and methodically displayed across the gallery walls. The tinkering creates a sensation of a shifting texture, housed in a visually stimulating acoustic environment. Rose uniquely blends electronic devices with instruments of the past, including player pianos and carillons, creating sounds and compositions of new sonic possibility, rather than musical preservation.
Over the past ten years Ethan has released recordings, scored films, performed internationally, and created sound installations. He has worked with a number of artists and organizations including Gus Van Sant, Molo Design, and The Portland Institute for Contemporary Art. Rose has received several grants from the Regional Arts and Culture Council and was recently awarded an Individual Artist Fellowship from the Oregon Arts Commission. Recent exhibitions, projects, and performances include Player Piano at Tilt Gallery.
Stephen Slappe / WE ARE LEGION (Portland, OR) Web Project
www.stephenslappe.com
Using video, installation, drawing and printmaking, Slappe sifts through the epistemological wake of technology and popular culture. Drawing on sci-fi, vampire, and B-movies, along with Google street view and footage of rural Oregon, his video projections blend humor, absurdity, and anxiety in works that reflect upon the notion of home, transience, and physical and psychological escape. For TBA:09 Slappe creates a never-ending army of costumed children in a web project entitled WE ARE LEGION.
Slappe’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally at the South Carolina State Museum, The Centre for Contemporary Art in Glasgow, The Sarai Media Lab in Delhi, Consolidated Works in Seattle, Portland Institute for Contemporary Art’s TBA Festival in Portland, Artists’ Television in San Francisco, and Saltworks Gallery in Atlanta. He received a 2007 Artistic Focus Project Grant from the Regional Arts and Culture Council in Portland, Oregon.
Special Labor Day Event
Slow Food Movement / Eat In Picnic (Portland, OR) Picnic
www.slowfoodportland.com
The members of Slow Food Portland—numbering over 500—are a diverse group of food enthusiasts with a curiosity about food traditions and heritage, local artisanal products, sustainable agriculture and the protection of the biodiversity of our local and global food sheds. Members include home and professional chefs, caterers, growers, vintners, restauranteurs, food educators, and lots of ordinary people and families that like to cook and eat and know where their food comes from. Join them in this special free Labor Day Picnic open to one and all.
Film/Performance
Daniel Barrow / Every Time I See Your Picture I Cry (Winnipeg, Canada) Film/ Performance
www.danielbarrow.com
co-presented with Cinema Project and NW Film Center
Winnipeg-based artist Daniel Barrow uses obsolete technologies to present written, pictorial and cinematic narratives centering on the practices of drawing and collecting. Barrow's newest "manual animation" combines overhead projection with video, music, and live narration to tell the story of a garbage man with a vision to create an independent phone book chronicling the lives of each person in his city.
Hitoshi Toyoda / Nazuna and Spoonfulriver (New York/Tokyo) Film
www.hitoshitoyoda.com
co-presented with Cinema Project and NW Film Center
Hitoshi Toyoda is a self-taught photographer who has worked exclusively in the medium of slideshows for the past ten years. These slideshows are silent and consist of images taken in the course of his daily life. While the material is taken from the past, the presentation of one image after another appearing and disappearing places emphasis on the weight and value of present moment.
Tyler Wallace + Nicole Dill / Between Us (Portland, OR) Performance, Video
Between Us is a performance-based outdoor video installation that examines the lines between private and public spaces, confidentiality and disclosure, voyeurism and exhibitionism. Set in a parking lot, the artists sit in a car and have a “private” conversation. The car is equipped with video cameras and microphones that transmit live video and audio feeds from inside the car. The videos are projected larger-than-life onto a nearby wall and the audio is amplified. The set-up resembles that of a drive-in theater. Unlike a traditional drive-in, however, the car in Between Us faces away from the projected image, converting the car into an imagined stage.
Tyler Wallace + Nicole Dill are completing their undergraduate work at the Pacific Northwest College of Art.
Lectures
Danielle Goldman / Close Encounters: Contemporary Dance and Theories of Intimacy (New York) Lecture
Paying particular attention to the choreographers presenting work in the TBA:09 Festival, the lecture will explore connections between contemporary dance and theories of intimacy in philosophy, literature, and histories of photography. What happens when bodies, sensually complex and laden with history, encounter one another at close range?
Danielle Goldman has taught in the Dance Department at Barnard College, the Performance Studies Department at New York University, and the Arts Department at The New School, where she is currently Assistant Professor of Dance History and Theory. She recently edited a special issue of Women & Performance, exploring gendered relations between music and dance, and was guest co-editor for the Movement Research Performance Journal #33. She has published articles in Dance Research, Dance Research Journal, Etcetera, and TDR: The Drama Review. Her book, I Want to be Ready: Improvised Dance as a Practice of Freedom, will be published by the University of Michigan Press in December, 2009. She is also a dancer who has worked with choreographers including Rachel Bernsen, Judith Sánchez Ruíz, Anna Sperber, and, most recently, DD Dorvillier and Beth Gill.
Peter Kreider / The China Syndrome (New York) Lecture
In conjunction with the release of a catalog co-produced by PICA and the Douglas F. Cooley Gallery, Reed College, TBA:08 artist Kreider returns to Portland to talk about his participation in an exhibition in China and his experience having work fabricated and exhibited in the “world’s workshop.” Kreider takes us on a wild ride as he recounts his journey from start to finish. In the end a poignant story of an emerging art market, cross-cultural collaboration, folly, intrigue, near catastrophe and eventual triumph emerges.
