EXHIBITION: MINI CONCERTS IN BACK ALLEYS
DATE: Saturday, December 1, 2007
ON VIEW: One Day Only At Various Locations throughout Lower East Side (see schedule)
HOURS: 2:00 – 11:30 PM
SMITH-STEWART is pleased to present MINI CONCERTS IN BACK ALLEYS, a one-day series of performances in and around the Lower East Side. A schedule of each performance location and time will be provided.
Mini Concerts will make various interventions on sites chosen by each artist throughout the Lower East Side. Be it on a mews or median, in an alley or cellar, each site specific location marries the audience to the performance, which collectively can only be described as shiny moments in dusty corners. In addition to being site specific each performance is time specific. All performances are between 5 and 15 minutes long, and are only performed once, serving to expose the drama of time. In a land where before and after are as significant as the during, the planned meets the impromptu and the important meets the forgotten.
SMITH-STEWART is located on 53 Stanton Street, between Forsyth and Eldridge Streets.
Gallery Hours are Wednesday through Sunday from noon to six. The nearest subway
stops are 2nd Avenue/Houston Street on the F and V lines, Grand Street on the B and D
lines and Bleecker Street on the 6 line. For more information, please contact the gallery
at amy@smith-stewart.com, 212.477.2821. Or visit the website: www.smith-stewart.com.
Brian Belott works himself into a shamanistic trance via repetitive rhythms and utterances that somehow function in a place between ingratiating and grating, irritating and irresistible.
Brian Bellot makes collage art, found art, performance art, and books, inspired by his cat Ming. He proudly hails from New Jersey and recently launched a new book Wipe That Clock Off Your Face published by PictureBox. A solo exhibition, of Brian's Swirly Music will be on view in December at Canada Gallery.
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Mark Beasley and Rose Kallal will collaborate on a performance of spoken word, drums, analog synth drone with 16mm loops combining color, light, and geometric forms.
Mark Beasley, an artist, writer, and scholar from London, has been reborn as a curator/producer for Creative Time in New York. Between 2004-2005 he was the Stanley Picker Research Fellow in Fine Art at Kingston University, London and has lectured internationally on issues related to contemporary art.
Rose Kallal creates multiple 16mm film loop installations that combine primordial imagery and abstracted forms, accompanied by live sound performance that draws from doom drone, minimalism and ambient. Her work has been shown at P.S.1, GBE at Passerby, NADA Miami, and most recently with Creative Time for the VS performance series.
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Caroline Breton is a professional actress for the National Theater in Paris and a performance artist. She studied Theater and Acting at E.R.A.C. Paris, France. She channels intuitive elements of song, piano, cello, dance and ritual throughout her performances.
Caroline Breton will perform IN VENIRE/IN UTERO 15 minutes of primitive, sorcerer theater, ephemeral with chalk, commending the muse’s gobbeldygook.
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Mind Castle writes songs that touch on such diverse topics as the JFK assassination¨ as told through the Oliver Stone film JFK, zombie parties, huts made entirely out of denim and journeys to the spirit world, Mind Castle hope to have fun and blow some minds.
Mike Force is a designer and illustrator who has worked on various music, fashion, and print projects including Fuse TV, The New York Press, Steven Alan, and Book Magazine. He illustrated Welcome to the Land of Cannibalistic Horses, a collection of essays from the Editor of Chiefmag.com.
Kate Ford makes art and likes to build castles out of sand.
Dan Perrone is a photographer and the creator of Uokahd (tapelake), an interactive audio. His artistic endeavors have been shown internationally.
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Arctic Circle is Tyler Burba, Jen DeNike and Carlton DeWoody. Guided by prevailing winds, they have found where the good stuff is. Over the past several years, they've bumped up the fun for kids with their PlayZones. Now in many of their restaurants, these wonderlands of slides, climbers, spring toys, and crawl tubes keep even the most energetic kids entertained. This week they will be performing their winter songs at sunset.
Tyler Burba is a musician, poet, philosophy scholar, and teddy bear Buddhist. His solo album Visit (surrealist lyrical tunes with cowboy poetry) was launched in 2006 by Farfalla Press; snowboots a collaborative project with DeWoody, is currently recording their premiere record, "Greatest Hits". Pending his PHD dissertation from European Graduate School in Switzerland, he plans on attending seminary for ordination at the General Theology Seminary in New York.
Jen DeNike has recently been studying light and collecting stones in the Arctic Circle. She is currently in production on a new video Gold Stars, a divine manifestation of these trips. Her next solo show in NYC will be February 2008 at Smith-Stewart.
Carlton DeWoody, born and raised in New York by an artist and collector, cannot take credit for his well-honed eye and ear, but makes sure to honor the blessing and respect the tingle. He studied music at Tulane University, philosophy at the University of Colorado, and poetry at The New School. His fine art training occurred years earlier in kindergarten at The Town School. He likes colors, sounds, and stuff that is fuzzy. He loves the names of things, but wants to change them. If you like potato chips you’ll love his band snowboots.
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Mads Lynnerup works in various forms of media from Shish Kebab meat and cardboard to installations using video and performance. His work challenges the idea of what art is and can be. Mads' work is currently on view at the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art (Cornell University) and has been exhibited at LACMA (Los Angeles), Mori Art Museum (Tokyo), Zacheta National Gallery of Art, (Warsaw), Kunsthalle Fridericianum, (Kassel) to mention a few.
Taking his inspiration from everyday life Lynnerup comments and draws attention to situations that might otherwise get overlooked in the day to day. Most of his work takes place outside in public setting, where he can create an interaction with his environment and the intended audience. For his performance Mads will be handing out custom made flyers to by passers commenting on the location and specific situation.
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Rachel Mason has been working for several years on the Hamilton Fish Opus, a historical fiction mystery saga based on their lives and misadventures of the two men, their family members and victims. The opera will be performed in various locations in the city where real events occurred. She will perform The Duel of Hamilton Fish, which is the prologue, on the steps of the Hamilton Fish Park.
On January 16, 1936 the front page of the Evening Star Newspaper of Peekskill ran two stories announcing the deaths of two unrelated men both sharing the name Hamilton Fish. One, a serial killer, was set to die that evening by electric chair at Sing Sing prison, the other, a descendent of the political line of Hamilton Fish's for which the park is named, died the previous day in South Carolina.
Mason received her B.A. From UCLA and M.F.A. From Yale in 2004.
Recent performances include a concert with her band at Art in General, a performance of Carlos II at Newman-Popiashvilli Gallery and a performance at 1830 in Los Angeles. Upcoming shows include a December 6, 2007 concert in Miami at NADA and exhibit at Karma International, on December 20 her second Ambassadors Album will be presented with figurines and a performance at Printed Matter. January 12 2008 exhibition of new work based on the Presidential campaign "2008" at Circus Gallery in Los Angeles. She will be performing in February in Los Angeles at JMOCA and 1830. She is also collaborating on a writing project with Will Blythe based on their campaign travels.
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Dirt Mound will perform You better look into it! Strange things happened there a 13 minute performance with a cast of oddly dressed characters and drawn paper figures will perform a memorial service for the forgotten children of Sonoma State. Dirt Mound is a free-form collective ripe with spontaneous sympathy, commemorative callings, erratic sounds and allegorical movements.
During the 1950's and 1960's Sonoma State Hospital in California housed some 3,500 children with diverse needs, from babies born with minor defects; to children with epilepsy and Down syndrome. The United States Government secretly used many of these children in radiation experiments. After much suffering most died early and were buried in an empty field without a headstone to mark their passing.
Elizabeth Huey founding member of Dirt Mound makes paintings, videos and installations that excavate imagery culled from history surrounding mental health, hospitalization and healing.
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Georgia Sagri’s piece is initially divided between two privileged areas of expression. On the one hand, fierce, seductive ritualistic performances exposing a celebratory body to the public eye, putting the viewer in a voyeuristic position of pleasure and desire. On the other hand, manic, idiosyncratic drawings, marks, ephemeral installations seem to emanate from a blast point on the paper and create locations in order to diffuse existed forms, to spread territories, to stage new gestures combined with lyrics as an ongoing process of illuminating rhythms. She will perform at night using the backdrop of benign public toilets.
Georgia Sagri uses various media such as sculpture, drawing, sound, text and movement to create situations of seduction and celebration, or as she likes to call her performances ‘examples of crisis’. She has exhibited widely in Europe and the U.S. Her work is currently on view at the 1st Athens Biennial and the Fractured Figure exhibition at the Deste Foundation. She is a second year MFA student at Columbia University.
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The band Y.O.U. will perform a live version of its annoyingly catchy single 5,4,3,2,1 (I LOVE Y.O.U), for the first time in history. The re-united band members Eric, Eric, Eric, Eric and Eric will perform at precisely 5:43:21 p.m. The performance of Y.O.U. will be produced, in part, thanks to the generosity of Sugar. Sugar is proud to sponsor emerging artists working in a variety of mediums. Sugar would like to remind you to Add Sugar™.
Behind Y.O.U. is Eric Adolfsen. Eric earned degrees in Art Semiotics and English at Brown University. In 2007 he completed his MFA at the Yale School of Art and was awarded the Barry Cohen Scholarship. He has participated in several shows, most recently the upcoming X Visual
Exhibition in Shenzhen, China this Fall. In addition to his personal practice of Making Pretend, Eric presently works as an Art Director at Brand New School in New York City.
