Begun as a 40-minute personal essay for French-German Arte TV, this then untitled film by EMPAC distinguished artist-in-residence Laurie Anderson captures a series of interconnected confessional stories set against a soundtrack of original music.

Partially filmed at EMPAC, the film has been expanded to feature length, driven by Anderson’s spirit of transformation, embracing uncertainty in her process while allowing the work to take on new properties as it was being made. In crossing the nebulous border between television and feature film, Anderson’s film reveals new insights into each, while also opening a cinematic window into her own life.

The screening will be accompanied by a discussion about Anderson’s artistic process, how making film soundtracks differs from making music, and what it’s like making something that gradually begins to turn into another thing altogether.

Imagine being inside a piano. Imagine the piano expanded to the size of a concert hall. This EMPAC-commissioned concert and installation is grounded in the idea of “prepared piano,” a tradition where screws, rubbers, bolts, etc., are attached to the strings inside a piano, altering the sound. Building on the many famous mechanically prepared piano compositions from John Cage to Aphex Twin, Expanded Piano transforms the idea into a uniquely electronic form.

An acoustic piano is wired with both regular microphones and contact microphones attached to the body of the piano, its strings, and mechanisms. Each microphone’s signal is manipulated in real time through a computer and then routed to its own loudspeaker, creating a multichannel space around the audience that puts the listeners “inside” the piano.

,000, is an EMPAC-commissioned multimedia artwork by Canadian artist Isabelle Pauwels. Layering sculpture, light, audio, and video, the performance guides the audience through the story of two entwined characters: a dying rust-belt town unable to let go of nostalgia for the “old days,” and a small-time actress struggling against the indignities of the film industry while making ends meet as a part-time dominatrix.

,000, tracks the history of the Canadian city of New Westminster, which lies on the periphery of Vancouver, alongside biographical details of its residents and the urban landscape that they inhabit. A former provincial capital founded by the United Kingdom in response to fears of an American invasion, New Westminster’s past is visible today only in the crumbling architecture, condominium marketing campaigns, community festivals, and grand landscaping. Its last economic lifeline comes from irregular use as a Hollywood film set, transformed for the screen into gritty industrial hub, a thriving west coast city, or a model of 1950s America. As a long-time resident of this “Hollywood North,” the aspiring actress Bijou Steal supplements her work by moonlighting as a dominatrix, producing hundreds of fetish videos for online clients.

,000, sets the proud but unattainable visions of city-hall marketing against the dirty narrative economy of the dominatrix and her clients behind closed doors. The audio and visual elements combine the competing voices of the players—the actress, her clients, the wives and girlfriends, the critics, and the town bureaucrats—into a collaged narrative, with the pre-recorded voice of each character embodied by a related object that includes props, sculptures, lights, speakers, and screens.

Narratively approached as an interwoven structure of the different characters’ views and interpretations, ,000, was composed by superimposing the structural logic of a crossword puzzle onto the city grid. Framed by the narrator and Paul Kajander’s score, Pauwels choreographs visual and auditory cues to guide the audience through a story whose differing associations and rapidly shifting references challenge viewers to assemble their own interpretations.

This performance has very limited capacity, please plan accordingly.

Isabelle Pauwels was born in Kortrijk, Belgium, and lives and works in New Westminster, BC. She received a BFA from Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design in 2001, and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2006. Working primarily in video, Pauwels’ blend of performance and documentary realism highlights the fraught relationship between narrative conventions and everyday social interaction. Focusing on the possibilities of non-linear editing, her video installations reconfigure popular genres such as the sitcom, the home movie, and the documentary. Recent exhibitions include the Power Plant, Toronto; the Western Front, Vancouver; National Gallery of Canada, Ontario, and the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia. Pauwels is represented by Catriona Jeffries Gallery.

Paul Kajander is a Canadian artist based in Seoul, South Korea. His practice encompasses video, sound, performance, installation, photography and drawing. Kajander’s recent works have been shown in various exhibition contexts (including the Daniel Faria Gallery; Toronto, the Seoul Museum of Art; Seoul, The Real DMZ Project; Cheorwon-gun, and ArtSonje Center; Seoul) and appeared in screenings, film festivals and publications. He has participated in residency programs at the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art’s Changdong International Studio Residency; Seoul, The Guesthaus Residency; Los Angeles, The Banff Centre; Alberta and “Rehearsal Research”; a residency partnership between the Scotiabank Dance Centre & Western Front Artist Run Centre; Vancouver. Kajander has been releasing independently recorded music projects on compact disc in various collaborations since 2001. His most recent recording project was released in 2014 under the moniker “Active Pass” and features 14 songs that combine electro-acoustic and popular music approaches to recorded sound.

For this installation, sound artist Jacqueline Kiyomi Gordon worked in residence to investigate how one’s perception of sound can be changed as he or she moves through space. Gordon created an interconnected series of listening rooms, each built with modular walls composed of a variety of materials (stone, metal, wood, cloth, etc.), and within it created a perpetually shifting audio experience from diffused sound projected from a ring of loudspeakers.

Gordon is a visual and sound artist who integrates audio technologies into sculptural forms to question relationships of affect to an environment. She has had solo shows at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (2014), Pro Arts Gallery (2013, Oakland), Eli Ridgway Gallery (2012, San Francisco), and Queens Nails (2009, San Francisco). She is also a member of the music and performance collective 0th.

,000, is a multimedia theatrical production that tracks the history of the Canadian city of New Westminster (near Vancouver) along with biographical details of its residents and the urban landscape that they inhabit. Layering sculpture, light, audio—including a score by composer Paul Kajander—and video, the performance guides the audience through the story of two entwined characters: a dying rust-belt town unable to let go of nostalgia for the “old days,” and a small-time actress struggling against the indignities of the film industry while making ends meet as a part-time dominatrix. The audio and visual elements combine the competing voices of the players—the actress, her clients, the wives and girlfriends, the critics, and the town bureaucrats—into a collaged narrative, with the pre-recorded voice of each character (recorded by the artist while in residence) embodied by a related object that includes props, sculptures, lights, speakers, and screens. Isabelle Pauwels’ work blends performance and documentary realism to highlight the fraught relationship between narrative conventions and everyday social interaction. Her recent exhibitions include the Power Plant, Toronto; the Western Front, Vancouver; National Gallery of Canada, Ontario, and the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia.

SOUND/MUSIC

This performance has been canceled. We apologize for the inconvenience. Please join us for Sabisha Friedberg's talk on May 8! With the seven-circuit labyrinth serving as a conceptual and structural base, artist Sabisha Friedberg creates a sonic sculpture using focused sound projection that demonstrates via allusion the parameters of such an environment. This work in progress will be presented as a live composition as well as an immersive environment.  Friedberg will present a series of events this spring including:

• performance, work in progress
  March 21
  Strange Cloak–Sub-Flight Infinity
• installation, work in progress
  CANCELED
  25: An Initiate: kneel path dweller beams
• talk
  May 8
  Sabisha Friedberg

The collective Wet Ink is a formidable vehicle for new music in the form of a presenting organization and two performing ensembles. Wet Ink takes its vernacular from the European avant-garde, but views it through a distinctly New York City lens—at times visceral and unrelenting, but still maintaining a complexity and richness in structure and sound. The members of the Wet Ink Ensemble, a septet, collaborate in a band-like fashion—writing, improvising, and preparing pieces together over long stretches of time.

Since 2008, Wet Ink has been engaged in a series of residencies with various arts organizations, including The Kitchen, the Walden School, Amherst College, Northern Illinois University, UC San Diego, Santa Clara University, Sacramento State University, UC Davis, Duke University, and at the Jazz Composers Orchestra Institute (Miller Theater, NYC). Wet Ink has recorded extensively. 

PROGRAM

Of Concentric Circles (for Alvin Lucier)* 

Alex Mincek BOOK OF RETURNS* 

Peter Ablinger katachi, part I 

Eric Wubbels cipher 

Kate Soper Broken Symmetries (or the Masses of Gauge Bosons) 

Sam Pluta * World premiere

Wet Ink

Erin Lesser - flutes

Joshua Modney - violin

Ian Antonio - percussion

Kate Soper - vocals

Alex Mincek - saxophones

Eric Wubbels - piano

Sam Pluta - electronics

Los Angeles-based artist Erika Vogt presented a collaborative theatrical production that brought together visual artists and performers who work across media, including Math Bass, Shannon Ebner, Lauren Davis Fisher, Mariah Garnett, MPA, Silke Otto-Knapp & Flora Wiegmann, Adam Putnam, and Mark So. The Artist Theater Program was a choreographed chorus of individual works that moved, collided and overlapped in time, responding to the space and mechanics of EMPAC’s architectural infrastructure by combining performers, artworks, sets, props, and lighting effects that echo the corporeal, erotic, sensual, expressive, and strange. By acting collectively upon physical or sculptural forms, the artists created an alternate framework for an experiential exhibition, one rooted in the desire to build and present an artistic community.

Erika Vogt’s work has been included in major international shows at New Museum, New York City; Hepworth Wakefield, Leeds; Triangle, Marseille; Whitney Museum, New York City; the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; and SFMOMA, San Francisco. Vogt’s video Darker Imposter was screened on Channel 4 television, co-commissioned by Frieze Foundation, London; and EMPAC.

From the connections between enclosure geometry and sound a potential future for acoustic architecture emerges. In this future, acoustic performance is an integral component of the design process, with surface geometries determined from the largest room scales down to the smallest sound absorbing pores. A continuous spectrum of geometric possibility encompasses traditional applied acoustic treatment, such as absorption and diffusion, and the debate surrounding the function of ornament is partially resolved.

Kristian Bezuidenhout is known for bringing a new dimension to the interpretation of Mozart’s piano music. Trained as a modern pianist, Bezuidenhout fell in love with the fortepiano—forerunner of the contemporary piano that is most commonly heard today. For this solo performance, Bezuidenhout performed music (on a fortepiano made by R. J. Regier) by Mozart and Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach.

Bezuidenhout divides his time among concerto, recital, and chamber music engagements, appearing in music festivals in Barcelona, Boston, Bruges, Edinburgh, Innsbruck, St. Petersburg, Venice, Utrecht, Salzburg, Luzern, Schleswig-Holstein, Tanglewood, and Mostly Mozart; and at many of the world’s most important concert halls including the Berlin and Kölner Philharmonie, Suntory Hall, Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, Symphony Hall, Konzerthaus Vienna, Wigmore Hall, and Carnegie Hall. He was nominated as Gramophone Magazine’s Artist of the Year 2013. 

PROGRAM

C.P.E. Bach

Rondo in C minor, Wq. 59/4, from für Kenner und Liebhaber

W. A. Mozart

Suite in C major, K. 399, with completion of the Sarabande by Robert D. Levin

Minuet in D major, K. 355

Gigue in G major, K. 574

C.P.E. Bach

Sonata in E minor, Wq. 59/1, from für Kenner und Liebhaber

Mozart

Rondo in A minor, K. 511

Mozart

Prelude and Fugue in C major, K 394

Sonata in A major, K. 331, 'Alla Turca' Fortepiano made by R. J. Regier - Freeport, Maine