Snake River
REDCAT Gallery in the Disney Concert Hall Complex
September 16-November 19, 2006
75 minute, 2-channel video installation created in collaboration with Charles Gaines and Edgar Arceneaux. Scored for 16 instruments featuring soloists Hans Fjellestad, Aiyun Huang, Gascia Ouzounian and Dana Reason
This exhibition encompasses new film projects shot at the Snake River, the Brucknerhaus in Linz, Austria and the historic Orpheum Theatre in downtown Los Angeles. The exhibition is a collaboration with REDCAT and the Lentos Museum of Modern Art.
The project takes the form of a film montage and installation that connects the two distinctive performing arts venues and the nearly 700 mile long Snake River that runs from Oregon into Idaho serving as the feed to over twenty tributary basins. Forming a literal and metaphoric analogy between the path of the river and the architecture of a rehearsal site, the artists traverse the sensorial and intellectual space that links the physical path of a primordial formation with the sentient abstractions of music. The music becomes a tributary of the architecture and, at the same time, the architecture becomes the instrument of the musical ensemble. This double identity is put into play by the analogy as the river is realized as geological architecture and the site of cultural history. The exhibition is accompanied by a two-volume catalogue documenting this project and the artists' works.
Musically, we’re in radically different territory too, with Sean Griffin’s “Snake River Suite,” a vibrant and jarring contemporary composition incorporating traditional orchestral instruments as well as synthesizers and a diverse percussion section. The rehearsal was filmed locally in the dark, moody Orpheum Theater.
During the two-hour span of the video, a nonverbal narrative unfurls, a loose progression from the intimate to the more detached, from the sensual towards mechanical, organic to constructed, in terms of aesthetic sensibility, from romantic to modern. Those contrasts suggest themselves through what they show us, not through anything they tell us.
- Los Angeles Times
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