Exhibition
Performance Archiving Performance
11/06/13-01/12/14
Performances · Exhibition-Related
Sky Room Concert with Jeff Kolar and Jennifer Monson
Cover Image:
Jennifer Monson, Live Dancing Archive, 2013. Courtesy the artist
Programmed in conjunction with “Performance Archiving Performance,” a presentation of works that engage archive as medium, on view in the Fifth Floor Resource Center from November 6, 2013–January 12, 2014.
Accompanying an improvised performance by Jennifer Monson, composer Jeff Kolar provides a sound design that responds to the delicate and sophisticated atmospheres and shifting spatial parameters of bodies in relationship to one another on-site in the New Museum’s Sky Room. The soundscape for the performance is generated live through field experiments in AM/FM, shortwave, citizens’ band, and unlicensed radio spectrums. The instrument arrangement of hand-built radio transmitters and receivers responds directly to external weather phenomena, wireless technology systems, and human activity. The body of the dancer and the shifting bodies of the audience, in concert with constant shifts in environmental conditions inside and outside of the New Museum, generate interference that provides the raw material for an improvised composition.
Jeff Kolar
Jeff Kolar is an audio artist and curator working in Chicago. His work, described as “speaker-shredding” (Half Letter Press) and “wonderfully strange” (John Corbett), includes cross-platform collaboration, low-powered radio, and live performance. Kolar is a free103point9 Transmission Artist and is the Director of RADIUS, an experimental radio broadcast platform. His work has been released on Panospria (Canada), Hak Lo-Fi Record (France), free103point9 (USA), and has appeared in compilations by furthernoise.org (Australia) and Sonic Circuits (USA). His video work was published in the DVD journal Aspect: The Chronicle of New Media Art. He presents at festivals, radio programs, exhibitions, and performance venues, which recently included GLI.TC/H, Megapolis, Kunstradio, and The Kitchen, as well as spaces in Argentina, Mexico, and the Netherlands, among others internationally.
Jennifer Monson
Jennifer Monson is a choreographer, performer, teacher, and dance curator who balances her artistic research and choreographic work between New York City and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. “BIRD BRAIN” (2000–05), “iMAP/Ridgewood Reservoir” (2007), the “Mahomet Aquifer Project” (2008–10), and “SIP/watershed” (2010) are projects by Monson that have radically reframed the role dance plays in our cultural understandings of nature and the wilderness. By bringing her work into outdoor settings and creating a framework for viewing it through workshops, panel discussions, and community involvement, Monson has found ways to re-engage the public in a heightened physical and sensory experience of the phenomena and systems that surround us. In 2004, Monson incorporated under the name iLAND–interdisciplinary Laboratory for Art Nature and Dance and is now a 501©(3) organization. iLAND investigates the power of dance in collaboration with other fields to illuminate our kinetic understanding of the world. It is a dance research organization with a fundamental commitment to environmental sustainability as it relates to art and the urban context, and cultivates cross-disciplinary research among artists, environmentalists, scientists, urban designers, and those in other fields. Her current project “Live Dancing Archive” (2012) proposes that dance systems themselves are archival bodies for the dynamics of ecosystems and includes an online digital archive and video installation drawing primarily on “BIRD BRAIN” and other environmental works. Monson is currently a professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign as part of a new initiative of the Environmental Council. Monson is also a Professor at Large at the University of Vermont, a six-year term in collaboration with the Dance, Environmental Studies, and Libraries faculties.
Please note there is no late seating for this event. Capacity is extremely limited.
Sponsors
Generous endowment support is provided by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, the Skadden, Arps Education Programs Fund, and the William Randolph Hearst Endowed Fund for Education Programs at the New Museum.
This program is made possible, in part, through the support of the New York State Council on the Arts and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs.
Education and public programs are made possible by a generous grant from Goldman Sachs Gives at the recommendation of David B. Heller & Hermine Riegerl Heller.
