Installations

This new-media installation and
performance explores the politics
and cultural attitudes about gender
and identity through the integration
of personal text narratives, barcode
label technology and the artist’s body
as an interactive canvas.
MEETING GOD
Adriana Varella
Meeting God discusses the body’s horizontality; how the essential moments of
existence--birth, sex, dreaming, death--involve being horizontal. All within an
intimate bedroom setting. Projections of multiple flesh on a mattress, arboreal
disorientations, the horizon before a sea-journey, eggs nursed and burst, and
a violent, celebratory dance of death and birth.
Hector Canonge is a filmmaker and new-media artist who lives and works in NYC, where
he studied literature, filmmaking, and integrated Media Arts. Canonge’s work has been
exhibited at museums and galleries throughout the world, and has been reviewed in the
New York Times, ARTFORUM, and many other notable publications. Canonge has been an
instructor at many institutions including New York College of Technology, CUNY and New
School University. He is the founder of the monthly LGBT film program CINEMAROSA. He is
also cofounder of Queens Media Arts and Development (QMAD), a non-profit arts organization that serves various communities of Queens with media programs in the arts.
MIX22
Hector Canonge
installations
SCHEMA CORPOREAL
mixnyc.org
Based in NYC, Adriana Varella produces work in multiple media: installation, video, audio,
photos, drawings, sculpture, performance, and site-specific public art projects. She is interested in challenging established power structures and the linear narrative form by exploring
the process through which they come to be. The process of her work is grounded on a critical reflection of perspectives of space/time, creating an interaction with viewers that fosters
a heightened state of consciousness while stimulating articulations.
MOTEL ROOM PORN
Inbred Hybrid Collective
Single-channel looping porn on a rear projection television with power
surge meltdown.
S/HEMALES
Paul Wirhun
Taoism teaches us that all of life is in a balance between Yin and Yang; when one
aspect becomes unbalanced it morphs into the other to regain inner balance.
One expression of this principle is at work in queer communities when “MEN”
go to the gym to gain the perfect (hypermasculinized) body, and become like
“WOMEN” in their concerns to be beautiful and achieve huge chests (breasts).
One issue of HX years ago showed Dolly Parton and some porn star on the same
page, and their tits were the same size. So I thought I’d put Dolly’s head on the
muscled male body and so began this delightful visual romp. ENJOY!
8
MIX NYC
Executive Director
Stephen Kent Jusick
Co-Directors
Rocko Bulldagger
Szu Burgess
Associate Director
Jeremy Gender
Installation Coordinator
Dominic Cloutier
Mailing Address
79 Pine Street #132
New York, NY 10005
Phone: 212-742-8880
Fax: 212-742-8882
BOX OFFICE
MAIN SCREENING ROOM
HOSPITALITY
WILDFLOWERS OF MANITOBA
S/HEMALES
ATLANTIS UNBOUND
FIGHT OR FLIGHT
THE PIER WHEN IT BURNT
LIVE ANIMATION PERFORMANCE
14
16
14
13
11
INSTALLATION MAP
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
5
15
17
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
17.
18.
THE KEY
SCHEMA CORPOREAL
MEETING GOD
I WANT TO BE LEFT A LOON
WE PUT THE P IN OOL
LIVING ROOM CINEMA
MY ‘PSYCHO’ BATHROOM
TOO RICH TOURISTS
MOTEL ROOM PORN
3
NOVEMBER 17–­­22, 2009
12
18
4
10
7
1
22nd
NEW
YORK
QUEER
EXPERIMENTAL
FILM FESTIVAL
6
_______________________ 21ST STREET _____________________
125 W. 21ST STREET
BTWN 6TH & 7TH AVE
IMAGE: WILDFLOWERS OF MANITOBA
2
9
These installations represent a diverse group
of artists from different stages of their careers.
It is the work of international talent and an
enthusiastic exploration of contemporary videoinstallation techniques achieved using an interdisciplinary approach, many sculptural elements,
new technologies, and some performance
elements. Taken together they convey the wide
scope of ideas influencing queer thought today. MY ‘PSYCHO’ BATHROOM
Dominic Cloutier
Installations Coordinator
The most infamous and terrifying shower scene committed to celluloid gets a
new soundtrack: a sanctuary interrupted by violence.
WILDFLOWERS OF MANITOBA
Noam Gonick & Luis Jacob
LIVING ROOM CINEMA
Stephen Kent Jusick
Home movies, of a sort, presented in an old-fashioned setting, recalling the
heyday of amateur filmmaking.
Szu Burgess & Alexis Pace
with live performance Wednesday Nov. 18, 9:30 pm
Marc Arthur
LIVE ANIMATION PERFORMANCE
Bill Hsu
Wildflowers of Manitoba is a performative installation of four short films and
sound presented in a furnished geodesic dome. The films feature four young
men living off the grid in an idealistic survivalist camp on the shores of Lake
Winnipeg during the summer of 2006. The loosely scripted scenes establish a
naturalist idyll seemingly removed from modernity. Like wildflowers, the male
subjects are intimately tied to a seductive meadow that is bordered by abandoned railway tracks and virgin beaches. Staged for the camera, the set and
subjects evoke a distant, more innocent era where alternative, collective lifestyles
flourished. The music by visionary seventies Québécois rock band Harmonium
suggests the potential for sexual and political freedom.
A 10-minute solo improvisation, using Hsu’s new performance system, PSHIVA,
that works with audio and animations. His system manipulates visual performance
components that evoke the tactile, nuanced, timbrally rich gestures that Hsu
enjoys in improvised music, allowing him to set up tensions between abstract and
referential elements, and between gestural and textual sections.
One of the most prominent young filmmakers in Canada, Gonick entered the film world at
the Toronto Film Festival with two films in official selection: 1919 and Waiting for Twilight,
and a book launch for Bruce LaBruce: Ride, Queer, Ride. Since then he has screened work
at the Venice, Berlin, and Sundance Film Festivals, and at MoMA in NYC. His films have won
numerous awards and are distributed around the world.
Bill Hsu is an improvising musician who works with electronics. He has built software,
installations, and compositions in collaboration with Peter van Bergen, John Butcher, James
Fei, Matt Heckert, and Lynn Hershman, among others. Recent performances include MIX
2007 (New York), Fete Quaqua 2008 (London), and Harvestworks New Works Festival 2009
(New York). He also performed with the PSHIVA system at the Sound and Music Computing
Conference in Porto, Portugal in July 2009.
Luis Jacob studied philosophy and semiotics at the University of Toronto. He works with
video, photography, performance, and actions in the public domain. His artistic practice typically extends to other fields of social and cultural work, and experimentation with alternative
forms for the creation of social interaction. Participation plays a central role in his work.
Jacob’s optimistic expressions delineate the multiplicity of philosophical discourses, engaging an anarchistic space in which to contemplate the history of Western culture.
THE KEY
Visual elements evolve between referential objects and abstract particle clusters.
Hsu’s inspirations include Rorschach inkblots and the occult practice of scrying, in
which images are seen in mirrors, bowls of water, etc. Hsu is interested in opening
up a wide range of visual associations, rather than rendering realistic animations.
FIGHT OR FLIGHT
Kadet Kuhne
Be sure to hold your breath for this tempestuous ride through bondage, suspension, and the power of the mind. Electrical impulses produce a kinetic expression of reactionary states in this adrenaline-packed spectacle.
Kadet Kuhne is a media artist whose work includes video, installation, and music composition. As an award-winning filmmaker she has numerous shorts that have screened worldwide including Infinite Delay, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, and her most
recent film, Fight or Flight, which premiered at the Resonant Forms festival at LACE Gallery.
Her installations involve a combination of motion detector sensors utilizing custom software
in Jitter, single or multiple channels and online virtual space, often exploring themes of
communication, control, and confinement.
The Key combines action painting, sculpture, and performance to challenge
spectators to view art in an interactive way. Performers planted in the audience
break the boundary between performer and audience as they emerge and create unique scenes and speeches within the audience itself.
A large paper is used to script/map/design a structure for the performance.
In general, the main concept of the work is: obtaining a key to enter through a
door. The innovation of this piece is the various media used to represent and
realize the concept.
Marc Arthur strips theatre of its essential elements to confront the ways we interpret and
construct conditions of human interaction. His work fuses physical media with live experience by asking questions such as: “How does sculpture unfold in a play?” and,“When is
the live act eternal?” He subverts spatial presence and the body to develop new modes of
production. His work articulates a combined logic of theatre and visual art.
I WANT TO BE LEFT A LOON
Peter Cramer
A bird, a lake, a landscape. A comic and tragic
multimedia installation. Taking the Greta Garbo
quote, “I never said, ‘I want to be alone.’ I only said,
‘I want to be left alone.’ There is all the difference,”
Cramer explores the relentless pursuit by the media of cult figures/celebrities. It is an intrusion both
privately and publicly—not just for the subject but
also the audience intending to be titillated by every
detail of someone else’s life. Special thanks to Sur
Rodney [Sur] and Materials for the Arts.
THE PIER WHEN IT BURNT
Patrick Staff
ATLANTIS UNBOUND
Lori Hiris
Atlantis Unbound tracks the scientific study of hereditary traits dating back to the
19th century with Sir Francis Galton’s attempt to outwit his uncle Charles Darwin,
to the discoveries of Thomas H. Morgan in the early 20th century with the Drosophilia Melanogaster fruit flies, to James Watson’s modeling of the double-helix
and finally to the incorporation of genetic traits in the database and the myriad of
possibilities technology presents.
Lori Hiris is a filmmaker whose work has been screened at various film festivals nationally
and internationally. Her films include With a Vengeance, The Invisible Hand, which is available at Printed Matter in NYC, and Cross Examination, which premiered at the New Festival
in NYC. Her installation Atlantis Unbound premiered at the San Francisco Film Festival.
WE PUT THE P IN OOL / SLEEPING GIANT
Carlo Quispe
Quispe’s primitive line adorns two bathrooms in a scatological orgy of delight
inspired by cartoonists such as Big Daddy Roth and R. Crumb.
Quispe is 31, born in Lima, Peru and now lives in NYC. Carlo’s work depicts men who have
sex with men and their very private lives. His comic Killer Heights had a public showing
in September at Printed Matter Inc. (www.printedmatter.org) and in October Carlo gave a
lecture about his comics at BAAD!, The Bronx Academy of Arts and Dance kicking off their
2009 BlackTino Performance Series. He is currently teaching visual literacy at the Hetrick
Martin Institute and is co-editing the next issue of World War 3 Illustrated, called “What We
Want” due out in early 2010.
Through a combination of text-based posters, sculpture, and projected video
with a performed voiceover, this multidisciplinary video installation explores a
deconstructed relationship between monolithic structures—here, the sprawling
seaside pier—and the origin of one’s identity. The piece merges with orbiting
fictions and explores a relationship with queer icons, in particular the writer
John Rechy. Using archive materials relating to the pluralized nature of the
rituals surrounding such structures, the piece at once unravels, whilst at the
same time weaving a web of multiplicitous sources and narratives; reflecting a
queer formation identity and a macabre relationship with one’s growing up and
relationships with fiction and queer figures in literature.
Drawing on appropriated narratives, myths and mythology, Hollywood legend, melodrama,
and the physical and narrative implications of space and location, Patrick Staff’s video and
installations deal with an exploration of reconstructing identity and narrative through a diverse
practice. Routed firmly in performative video installation, the work touches upon themes of
the new narrative movement and explorative fiction, using sound, sculpture, and obscuring
structures to expand upon and make malleable an approach to suspense, melodrama, and
storytelling. His work creates a temporally free fantasy space, tableaux vivants, suspended in
moments of tense vibration, both intrinsically referential and obsolete of history.
TOO RICH TOURISTS
Smith & Lowles
In a toxic haze of red, white, and blue gloss paint, an artificial forest opens up, a
sanctuary where baroque meets pop, fairy tale meets grunge, purity meets sin...
where red, white, and blue are re-appropriated as nature, at a time when there
is a desire for an alternative reality. A place where everyone’s a tourist.