PALACIO DA CULTURA
Video projection on the pavement street that separates the Palacio da Cultura and Praia's main plaza. The 30 minute loop of a shipreck in Praia's bay was transgressed by pedestrian and car traffic. When projected onto a white van, the projection would light up and distort and be raised from the gound. Praia Cabo Verde, June 2008.
FUNDACION AMILCAR CABRAL
Video installation about Cape Verde's water resources. Group exhibition organized by César Schofield, Praia Cabo Verde, June 2008.
THE LISBON VILLAGE FESTIVAL 2007
Installation show as part of Village festival.
Fundação Portuguesa das Comunicações
Portugal, June 14th to July 8th 2007
www.villagefestival.net
The Lisbon Village Festival (LVF) is a cultural event dedicated to the digital generation, composed by three main areas: films, exhibits and music. It is a response to an emergent cultural movement where the artistic creation is strongly influenced by new information and communication technologies.
The LVF had its 1st edition at June 2006 and counted with the presence of more than 10.000 spectators. During one week, Lisbon was the meeting point between cinema directors, producers, actors, plastic artist’s users of new media inter-disciplinary technologies.
The LVF's 2007 edition will take place from 07 to 24 of June in several emblematic places of Lisbon. The presence of international celebrities is also news each year at Lisbon Village Festival. Also turning some international media heads is the International Jury of the official competitions that brings together five distinguished cultural personalities from all over the world
Village Art
The Village Art t is part of the LVF program and opens the Lisbon Village Festival 2007. Its main goal is to open three respected cultural places in Lisbon, offering the public an alternative in the artistic offer of the city. A series of exhibits of new media and digital tendencies will show the constant presence of technologies in contemporary art. The presented works authorship will be from foreign and Portuguese artists, with a strong international guest that will prestige the event. The first exhibition’s launching is scheduled for June 07th and the Village Art will go on until mid-July.
Natércia Caneira
Village Art Coordinator
Lisbon Village Festival
SOUNDSCAPE
September 14 and 15-June 15th and 16th
368 Congress street, Boston MA 02210.
Savvas Spyridopoulos
info@SOUNDSCAPE2007.COM
(617) 669 - 5690 http://www.soundscape2007.com/
SOUNDSCAPE will take place, in a large space, which is detailed in the diagram below. Each red circle represents a single musician. The two paired circles at both ends of the chain represent a drum and bass duo, and the individual circles represent soloists. The two duos will be synchronized by monitor speakers. The black lines represent walls, constructed continuously from floor to ceiling, to isolate the sounds of the different areas. The musicians are linked, visually and audibly, only to their two neighbors. They will be playing in response only to these others. Even though the musicians’ playing will be quite free, musical cohesion will be maintained by playing the same vamps (simple defined musical motifs) and jazz tunes. The result will be a chain of sound that transforms from one area to the next, but has a smooth flow of communication. Throughout the space will be sight specific artworks, from lighting installation and sculpture, to video and architecture, which relate to ideas of motion, sound, space, and dynamic flow. As audience members move throughout the space to view the artwork the sound will modulate and change for their ears as the art does for their eyes.
Caption: The large video projection corresponds to the reflected image on a mylar sheet attached to a base drum on an adjecent room. The video image looks as a direct camcorder image of the space, just a still capture. When the drummer hits the pedal, it makes the image on the projection reverberate, and with it the image of the keyboard player and the audience in the space. The visual effect is a tight connection between the sound and the image, of both the musicians and the audience. The interesting effect is that the projected image on the wall takes a fluid form, that adds humor and surprise to a rather documental like image of a sound performance.
Caption: The small video projection corresponds to the reflected image on a mylar sheet attached to the entrance to the SOUNDSCAPE venue. The airflow generated by the audience moves the mylar. The result is a distorted image of the space, musicians and the audience on the adjecent room. Photos by Stephen Spinetto.
The architectural component of this project consists of the walls’ configurations, and specific details of their construction, and the use of light to integrate visual art and architecture. The walls are not merely structures dividing the space, but canvases for the artists. They will be constructed straight, radiused, at slight angles, and out of plane as sculptural and video installations dictate. The back and forth communication between art and architecture is the visual and spatial parallel of the musical back and forth communication of the musicians.
Prior to the event, we will hold several rehearsals for the music performance, attended by both the musicians and the visual artists. The musicians will play, then the artists will respond. At the following rehearsal, the musicians will find a newly transformed environment. They will play again. The artists will respond further. The musicians will play again, and so on back and forth. This communication between different media, which are more related than may sometimes seem on the surface, is the core idea of SOUNDSCAPE. The process of this collaborative environment is what will allow a true synergy to happen between sight and sound
DE/CONSTRUCT
Temporary installations on a 4,000 square foot loft
On view May 18-27 1:00-7:00pm
150 chestnut st. 7th floor, Providence, RI. http://150chestnut.blogspot.com/
Seven artists and two architects create work that temporarily inhabits the spaces within a 4,000 square foot loft in providence, RI. The loft is slated for demolition and reconstruction following the exhibition. This afforded the artists the chance to literally decontruct and/or reconstruct their work and the space they've chosen within the loft. The loft is located at 150 chestnut st. In the jewelry district of providence, RI.
"Portrait of Light and Direction"
Magaly Ponce
Video, blinds, silver mylar, air filter metal scraps.
Caption: I started working with the memory of a video image artist Jimmy Rahn and I generated while at a residncy at the Experimental Television Center in Owego, NY. I used this image to reflect on light as a dynamic and playful element. I took appart the air conditioner filters and discover these amazing metal scraps with printed arrows on them that I used as a drawing element. I also used eight large size blinds to create a sculpture that reflected the nature of the manipulated video image, their fluidity, simplicity and maleability. The video is reflected on a sheet of silver mylar that responds to the airflow from an adjacent window, distorting the image of the tv screen and the space even more. Three photos by Lisa Perez.
Incorporates six different projections of hazy landscapes, and horizon, blurred figures/subjects and their reflections. Projected on different walls of the 2nd floor hallway and the space between the elevators, the mixture of images produces an encompassing luminescent environment that appears at once real and illusionary.
The first projection occupies the space between the elevators, screening with two cameras the real-time images of people coming in and out of the elevator. While the black-and-white camera is focusing on people's feet and their reflection on the floor, the other, color camera is capturing people's full figures and their reflections on the floor. Since one camera is flipped down while recording and the other is manipulated by computer the projected images are also flipped, meaning that images of the actual body-movements are on the bottom and their reflective images are on the top. Moreover, the fact that the floor of the entire 2nd floor also has highly reflective surface contributes to yet another doubling or extension of reflections: from the wall projection to the the surrounding space.
This play of reflections continues in the set of two other projections displayed on the corner walls of the long hallway so that the second projection mirrors/reflects the first. Here the pre-recorded imagery of vast un/known landscapes blends in with those of water, sunlight, shadows, people and their reflections, creating a space that erases a borderline between physical appearances and fantasies. However, every time the color camera in the space between the elevator is activated, recoding live images of people coming in and out, the same footage is played back with 3 second-delay and is split into two projections on the corner walls (so that the second mirrors/reflects the first), allowing oneself to see the self reflection but also the reflections of others entering the same space.
Lastly, three vertical projections are presented on another long wall of the hallway. Functioning like a large triptych they are playing the pre-recoded images of the empty hallway and its reflections and the artist body in motion and her reflections, exploring the experience of (self)reflection, and the idea of mirroring of the self and the surrounding. Indeed, Ponce's multi-part video installation Subject, Horizon, Reflection is an embodiment of reflectivity, altering an ordinary walk-way space into its poetic, dream-like reflection.
insite05.org/ Caliente Project
First Residency, November 2004
Second Residency, March 2005
Third Residency, September 2005
Event Photographs by Alfredo De Stefano
Every image is surrounded by an atmosphere of world. Sartre
“There will be no recital formality, no successive presentation of independent pieces, but rather the collective sculpting of an event, the formation and building of a community. Artist collaborators will perform from within the collective space, rejecting the traditional stage/house orientation and artist as author/hero mythology. The audience is considered an active participant and must be given meaningful access to the “public” discourse – the engagement-avoidance binary alone is not a meaningful mode of interaction in this context.” Curatorial Statement Excerpt
“Remains”
Wallace L. Anderson Gallery
& Maxwell Library
Bridgewater State College
February 14th 2005
This exhibit explores the relationship between fear and desire. In the tradition of Lysistrata, Ponce uses some humor to reflect on love and war, and wholeness and fragmentation. The artist is intrigued by how small scale ‘personal moments’ can have a larger and more powerful presence when grouped together, or accumulated over time. The desegregation of the body in a formal sense allows the coverage of a bigger psychological and physical space. By this act of dispersion, transcendence is achieved.
It consists of small hair sculptures, suspended in the center of the Library atrium, and three video loops projected on a video screen and floors. Five 3 by 8 digital prints and 24 2x5 prints of Japanese paper are suspended from the florescent lights on the second floor as containers for an image. There are 24 lights of 47 by 21 inches app. In the gallery there is frequency sounds of the US (50Mhz) and Chilean (60 MHz) electric current.
“Concurring Cities and a Cicada”
Curator: Olivia Lahs-Gonzales
Lucy and Stanley Lopata
Sculpture Garden The Sheldon Art Galleries
September 2003 to May 2004
The exhibit integrates poetic texts applied to the surface of nine windows surrounding the sculpture garden with a sound composition of cicadas and other ambient sounds. Ponce’s piece engages the viewer directly by “speaking” to them through the applied text, but also utilizes the “world beyond the windows” of The Sheldon by integrating the window reflections of the urban environment outside the Sheldon. The whole is a complex poetic and layered response to the building’s architecture, the experience of place and the viewer’s relationship to the work.
Located in the glass atrium area between The Sheldon Art Galleries and The Sheldon Concert Hall, the installation presents a metaphoric space where the “Ear and the Eye” meet. The work is a poetic reflection on the space and its architectural, perceptual, historic, social, political, mythic and spiritual implications. The artist’s observations are meshed with the viewer’s physical perception of the space (subjective vision, touch and hearing) and the objective space (brick, city limits, etc.)
The installation promotes an inquisitive and interactive process and through the combination of Ponce’s poetic text, sound, spatial and visual interactions asks the viewer to find resonating interconnections between personal and public histories.
“Follow the Highway”
2002- 2003
This project first began when I found seventy-two small scale chest x-rays of mine workers dated from 1977 in an office of the Victoria, an abandoned nitrate mining town in the Northern desert of Chile. These x-rays inspired me to make a project that dealt with the cycle of exploiting the desert in order to live, but also to eventually die there. The town I was born, Maria Elena, became a ghost town just like Victoria as a result of this same struggle.
Scala en Valparaíso
Former Male Prison Complex
Ex-Cárcel, Chile 2000
“Amherst/Valparaíso”
2002
Installation on the store front windows at the FortGondo Compound for the Arts. Two 3x4 video monitors display a fifteen-minute loop. On one monitor there was the footage of the moon travelling across the Northern Hemisphere, recorded in the US. The second monitor had footage of the moon travelling across the Southern Hemisphere, recorded in Chile. The moon travels the sky from left to right and from right to left respectively. Two speakers, installed on
the street, played the immigration regulations from the US embassy in Chile.
