From: Thomas Beard (email suppressed)
Date: Mon Jul 21 2008 - 13:27:24 PDT
Light Industry
http://www.lightindustry.org
Spectacle Spectacular
Curated by Ben Coonley and Michael Smith
Tuesday, July 22, 2008 at 8pm
55 33rd Street, 3rd Floor
Brooklyn, NY
On the hottest day of the summer, Ben Coonley and Michael Smith planted a
tripod-mounted camcorder in the center of the Light Industry loft space and
made several dozen 360-degree pans to catalogue every square inch of the
walls, windows, pipes, ceiling elements, furniture, fans, A/V equipment and
miscellaneous debris in the room. They found hidden miniature treasures:
speaker cables leading up and away to invisible spaces, baseboard paint
blobs in the shape of trompe lıoeil mouse holes, lunar landscapes on the
surfaces of massive cement columns and newly-installed sheetrock.
They zoomed outside the back window facing the East River clear across to
the Statue of Liberty. Down in the parking lot an ice cream truck began its
route and tested its loudspeakers, a school bus shook and rattled as it
turned a corner, a tractor-trailer screeched to a stop, and workers unloaded
crates of raw material onto a freight elevator. With each successive camera
rotation, mounting temperatures conspired with site-specific demands of the
loft and surrounding environment, eventually giving shape to a hallucinatory
polyphonic program of films and videos tracking Ben and Mikeıs idiosyncratic
and meandering curatorial digressions.
Taking its title from Harrison Marksıs seminal film about a myopic executive
whose perception is transformed after he finds an enormous wishbone in his
turkey sandwich, Spectacle Spectacular offers a leisurely summer excursion
for the senses, a ³Circle Line² tour of context and space.
The program includes an audience-immersive simulcast tableau of the Sunset
Park sunset, followed by an eclectic grouping of work by Jason Burch, Peter
Gidal, Karen Leo, Xander Marro, Harrison Marks, Xan Price, Stuart Sherman,
Cauleen Smith and the Kids from Kidstock.
Ben Coonley makes videos and live presentations that have been shown online
and at film festivals, museums and microcinemas, including the New Museum of
Contemporary Art, International Film Festival Rotterdam, 2nd Moscow
Biennale, Cinematexas and the New York Underground Film Festival. He was a
regular contributor to Movies with Live Soundtracks, a quarterly performance
event based in Providence, RI from 1998-2004. He has taught media design at
the New School, and will teach video production at Princeton University in
the fall.
Michael Smith's performances, videos and installation works have been seen
at a variety of venues and public spaces, including galleries, museums,
night clubs, the streets and on television. Smith was included in the 2008
Whitney Biennial and his solo show at Hales Gallery in London just closed.
A retrospective, entitled, Mike's World: Michael Smith and Joshua White (and
other collaborators), is currently on view at the ICA in Philadelphia. He's
the recipient of numerous awards and grants and most recently was awarded
2007 fellowships from the Tiffany Foundation and New York Foundation for the
Arts. Smith splits his time between Brooklyn and Austin, TX, where he
teaches at the University of Texas.
Tickets - $6, available at door.
About Light Industry
Light Industry is a new venue for film and electronic art in Brooklyn, New
York. Developed and overseen by Thomas Beard and Ed Halter, the project has
begun as series of weekly events at Industry City in Sunset Park, each
organized by a different artist, critic, or curator. Conceptually, Light
Industry draws equal inspiration from the long history of alternative art
spaces in New York as well its storied tradition of cinematheques and other
intrepid film exhibitors. Through a regular program of screenings,
performances, and lectures, its goal is to explore new models for the
presentation of time-based media and foster a complex dialogue amongst a
wide range of artists and audiences within the city.
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For info on FrameWorks, contact Pip Chodorov at <email suppressed>.