ISCP Talk
December 15, 2015

Blued Trees for Aqueous Earth

Aviva Rahmani will perform the first three movements of Blued Trees, a five-part symphony that began with an overture in Peekskill, New York during the summer solstice in June 2015 and will conclude on Election Day in 2016. Newtown Creek is the second movement of the symphony, and is conceived in relation to the exhibition Aqueous Earth. Blued Trees at ISCP will be a musical installation with live performers and projections and will include a requiem for the lost habitat of Newtown Creek that has become a Superfund site.

Peekskill was chosen for the overture of Blues Trees because plans for expanded pipelines there would pass within 105 feet of the flawed Indian Point nuclear plant which is only 30 miles from New York City. The music for Peekskill was installed as a series of vertical symbols painted on trees with ultramarine blue and buttermilk, to grow moss and reflect the connection between trees and water. The designated pattern of the painted trees was aerially conceived as one-third-mile-long musical measures. One tree equaled one note. Blued Trees has or will be been installed in 20 sites internationally, and is copyrighted to initiate litigation against the pipeline companies.

This program is supported by the National Endowment for the Arts.

Participating Residents

ISCP Talk
December 8, 2015

Salon: Sophie Jung, Lilian Kreutzberger, and Maruša Sagadin

Sophie Jung’s work revolves around the awe of unstable semiotics. With her textual and textured sculptures, she addresses the earnest and often absurd desperation in which uncertain concepts are packed into words, objects or facial expressions, shifting their assumed meaning from work to sentence to song. For the Salon, she will perform a selection of sculptures and elaborate on her recent work Operation Earnest Voice commissioned by Ballroom Marfa.

Painter and sculptor Lilian Kreutzberger synthesizes research into the futility and challenges of modern utopias and the role that urban space plays within them. Her wall-reliefs deal with process, abstraction and painting. Their scale and materiality either reveal or add ambiguity to how the work is read—as a map, motherboard or hieroglyph.

Maruša Sagadin’s practice centers on the relationship between language, architecture, gender and sculpture, drawing inspiration from pop and subculture sources. For the Salon, she will speak about new work that collages images from magazines, LP records and YouTube.

ISCP Talk
November 24, 2015

Salon: Tony Albert and Aleksander Komarov

Tony Albert will speak about his work Once Upon A Time (2013-2014), which won the prestigious Basil Sellers Art Prize. Once Upon A Time deals with racism in sports, and by implication, Australian society. The work focuses on the crowd abuse directed towards Indigenous Australian Football League player Adam Goodes. Albert will address the controversy behind the treatment of Goodes and another work within the same theme that looks at a series of letters he wrote to Australian artist Gordon Bennett.

Aleksander Komarov presents his ongoing project Language Lessons. Komarov investigates the construction of language among immigrants in establishing their identities. He is interested in the role that language and the voice plays in political, cultural and social issues, and how language shapes individual and collective experience. In his work Palipaduazennije (2013), Komarov asked a group of Belarusian immigrants to describe one word in their “native” language that is associated with immigration.

Participating Residents