Category Archives: music video

AfteRain See Chelsea Sea

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Did a Birthday Art Crawl Friday and actually had a nice time talking to people in the Picasso show and running into old friends from the Allan Stone Gallery. It felt the Neo Good Old Days… and boy could that Picasso fucker paint. It was one of those rainy Chelsea spring days where you somtimes have to duck into a little pub for a whiskey while the rain blows over. It reminded me of this Coltrane song and also this older vide with The Velvets and Nico doing Chealsea girl. 2006 I think. It was raining then too.

Novel Ideas (The White Whale Goes to the Great White North)

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Orson Whales swam up to Canada for a show at Oakville Galleries. They are projecting the video and have all the original drawings stacked in a glass vitrine like some sort of unholy relic. Last week The Whale was also featured by Flavorpill’s Daily Dose. Like the Leviathan that inspired it, this viral video refuses to die. Here’s the Video in case you’ve missed it:Adam David Brown, Ian Carr-Harris, Brian Dettmer, Paul de Guzman, Alexandre Itin, Nicholas Jones, Georgia Russell, Robert The

In a rapidly growing world of new technology and electronically disseminated ideas, books have become endangered entities. They are old-fashioned forms in a society that feeds on convenience, archival impulses and a constant desire for instant gratification; in which information travels fast, and at the single click of a button. In this exhibition, artists create tangible forms that demonstrate the book’s practical use: to be consumed, absorbed, and eagerly explored by inquiring minds and willing hands. Books become snapshots of a specific time and place, not only in the stories they tell, but through their very bindings and typefaces, even by the distinct telltale aroma that only the most time-worn novels can possess. Here, bound pages are transformed into sculptural objects of curiosity, valued not only for their content, but for the many aesthetic possibilities of reconfigured paper and ink.

Novel Ideas explores the reincarnation of found objects and literary detritus in a collection of bookworks by eight international artists. The featured artists seemingly resist suggestions of rapid technological progression with their more rudimentary approaches to art: acts of slashing, cutting, dissecting and extraction are reductive processes that reveal the presence of newly-appropriated meaning through the very voids they create. Thus, with marks borne from blades rather than brushes, these books become more than just vessels for information and narrative fancy—they begin to exist as physical testaments to their own novel forms and ideas, questioning the way we traditionally consume the written word.

This form of consumption mirrored in each act of physical extraction made upon aging covers and delicate pages demonstrates the ease with which ideas can be manipulated to create alternate modes of visual and intellectual instruction. Classic stories and didactic texts are transformed by acts of selective cutting that leave surprising and new visual narratives. Some texts are gutted and dissected, actively questioning the limitations of scholarly authority, while other artists play directly on the novel itself as a statement piece, with works that are sculpted to reflect their titular properties. Video pieces, on the other hand, present a simultaneous contrast and union of traditional and new media.

These artistic processes recall functions of editing, erasure and censoring, all vital elements in the act of literary creation. But perhaps more importantly, they reflect a constant human need to question, appropriate, challenge and interpret. In Novel Ideas, words are consumed and ideas are released from the bounds of their covers, wholly concrete, and forming new entities unto themselves. Here, books become curious objects of beauty to behold, and a celebration of everything that exemplifies the archaic charm of ink on paper, and of pages turned and cherished.

by Gabby Agoncillo

Wyld Bites

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In what feels like a flow of collaborative energy, I spent yesterday editing some footage shot by Dave Scarborough from my opening party of The Royal Wylds playing 17 Frost Street. I quite enjoy how the talking head sometimes seems to synch with Will Croxton’s vocals. A great software program would be to take the thousand head man and build a audio sensitive logarithm that could fit the face to certain key vowel and consonant sounds in speech so that the head would be like a giant Wizard of Oz and would synch up behind the singer, or comic, or performer, or whatever. Oh if I knew anything about computers I’d do it. But even in this ambient accidental method, it’s a pretty funny trick. Later that afternoon I played with some of Akaash’s tapes on the floor: letting them and the tiles dictate some abstract gestures, etc. I’m hoping he’ll swing by and work into it. Ironing out details on the closing party. More on that later.

The Addictions

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So I’m back. The better half is back and sleeping has become less an act of rolling around in lonesome sheets till sunrise and more like, you know, sleeping. The screening is done and I was happy with the narrative arc of the pieces together as a group. I feel like I’ve been composing about a half hour stream of consciousness narrative over the last two, or three years in video. I have composed it all out of sequence and semi unconsciously and every time I do a screening (which is more and more frequent) I try to take the opportunity to chip away the extraneous bits and get to the core themes and images. I get closer and my present feeling is that I will have to overlap and edit the present sequence into a more coherent and shorter whole… Or Mash it up into a two channel diptych which worked beautifully at Monkeytown several months ago. Speaking of Mash ups, My favorite part of the weekend was hearing David Scarborough play some of his songs. He has appeared in cameo on several of the Frost Vlog videos helping me hang the big paintings, etc. I knew he sang, but it’s always nice when someone exceeds your expectations. At some point I did some timelapses of him playing (and his wife watching the whole set, sitting at his feet in what has to be the most romantic tableau I’ve seen in months). After we got the video equipment set up on Saturday night and after we’d had a few beers, I shot a video of him on my little flip cam singing in front of my animations. It was strange how the song and the pictures seemed to collide in happy tragedies.

Remain In Light

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This whole process of writing is fraught with deep oceans of doubt. I try to remain positive about my self and my memories, but of course I am reliving some idiot times. This is an old video from two or so years ago, but is now in HD and properly deinterlaced. The sound track is a mash up of Glass’ Einstein on the Beach, playing at various speeds.

Hanging Myself

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Not funny really in this time of Infinite Jests, but maybe it is really exactly how I feel. I mean in the sense of eternal return, or Metampsychosis, or however you spell it and whatever Joyce was talking about…. I’m hanging the show. I feel like a worker… in the Marxist sense of that word: working on the ladders with the back into it. I mean to say that hanging a book is a physical act. I’ve been training for it like a boxer at the gym.. but my fucking thumbs are still weak for the push pins and the map pins and the pins and needles and needles and pins…..feel like a carpenter… feel like Christ crucified… stigmata on my thumb. LOL. music here is some odd Brian Wilson post Smile mid mad period song. Fucking lovely and perfect fit for my raw time lapse. More to come…

The Dark Side of the Loon

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darksundry.gifThere was a rainbow around the moon tonight at ten and I ran up to the roof to watch the lunatic clouds flowing by all back lit in a Pink Floyd prism and I was thinking about Rick Wright dying and David Foster Wallace hanging himself from the end of an infinite jest and the stink of sepsis fills the house from the necrotic tumor of my slowly dying dog and it was another day at the vet with free falling finance and the threat of reemergent Republicans buzzing in my ear from my little A.M. radio I use to keep my self from going insane, or it’s opposite. So I thought of the Organ opening to Us and Them from the Dark Side of the Moon and decided to share it with you. A little memorial service from the cathedral of cold front clouds.

Fever

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The Royal Wylds played a garden gig in Red Hook over the weekend. I couldn’t resist the strung lights distortions and made a little photomotion video. What else can I do with low light and no working video camera? Still it sort of captures something about the rawness of the group that I like.