Chiara Giovando
Selected Projects
2016, Disjecta Contemporary Art Center, September 26 - November 1
This exhibition is an iteration, another piece or part of the expanded use of the score. To make a score is to suspend utterance. A score is like a door or a gate or a portal, through which sound, gesture and action can pass between the world of thought (a composer’s thought) and the vigorous world conceived in thought (the player’s moment). The thing transmitted is not fixed to its point of origin. It must be- come new again, and again, and again, each time it is played. In this way the player and their audience possess the score each time it is played.
There are two scores presented here that visitors are invited to perform themselves, and three more that will be performed for our guests over the duration of the exhibition.
The Book of Scores is an exhibition of five national and international artists and composers invited to create scores or directions for musical and performative interpretation. The exhibition comprises the resulting works and their matching actions.
Drawing from various histories, including Fluxus action pieces and graphical notation, The Book of Scores will use sculpture, textiles, coded languages, and the gallery itself to investigate what can be communicated through the symbolization of process over time, and what is inevitably lost. Similar to the most basic function of writing, which acts as a kind of time capsule for utterance, the score has the ability to transport an intention. When interpreted, the score assumes a real-time or immediate body, and becomes not only an archival communication but a living one as well. Collaborating with local musicians, actors and activists, The Book of Scores will include performances of the visual scores.
PERFORMANCE SCHEDULE: Saturday, September 26, 8PM
• Johannes Lund – Newly commissioned composition for four players. • Tobias Kirstein – Kirstein will give directions for actions and a performative talk. • Helga Fassonaki – All female vocal ensemble will perform inside and outside of the gallery building.
Ongoing
• Ellen Lesperance – Visitors are invited to borrow Lesperances’s score, a knitted sweater, recreated based on an archival image from the Greenham Commons activist encampment. Visitors are then invited to ware the sweater or “score” to perform their own direct action out in the world. Actions will be tracked on the following website: congratulationsandcelebrations.org.
Saturday, October 24, 8PM
• Alison O’Daniel: Performance of large scale sculptural score covering the floor of the main gallery, involving skateboarders and choir.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS Helga Fassonaki (New York), creates and curates sound and visual installations, group situations, films, and performances that utilize and question temporality, power structures, subcultures and the human body as a sculptor of sound in space. Fassonaki collaborates with New Zealander Andrew Scott in the free-psych duo Metal Rouge. Their Three for Malachi Ritcher album was included in the Public Collector’s exhibit in the 2014 Whitney Biennial and Experimental Sound Studio’s Audible gallery in Chicago. She heads her own brand of noise in her solo project yek koo, exploring the body as a vehicle for the movement of sound. She is co-founder and director of Emerald Cocoon, a record label founded in 2008 devoted to releasing music from the ‘empty quarter’ – an area where the aesthetics of punk meet the philosophies of free jazz. Her Radio Concept Tour (2014-present) explores the relationship between body, microphone and air movement transmitted through radio waves. Her recent project Khal investigates the idea of a ‘living score’ by initiating a passage of visual scores, actions, and conversations between participating artists and the public. Iterations of it will be featured as a traveling exhibition in the US and NZ in 2015 at Glasshouse (Brooklyn, NY), LACA (Los Angeles, CA), Disjecta (Portland, OR), Audio Foundation Gallery (Auckland, NZ), and Nga Taonga Sound & Vision (Auckland, NZ).
Tobias Kirstein (Copenhagen), is an artist, writer and musician who has worked with, among others, Tony Conrad, Pär Thörn, Goodiepal, Leif Elggren, Rhys Chatham, CM von Hausswolff. Kirstein is also part of Lights People, the drum duo To\To and numerous collaborations. He has done performances and exhibitions in US, Japan, Russia, Sweden, Germany. Kirstein lives and works in Copenhagen, Denmark. He is educated in philosophy, has worked on an advertising agency and now teaches at a Business School, while also running MAYHEM, a venue for extreme and experimental music together with Johannes Lund.
Ellen Lesperance (Portland), has been exhibited widely, most recently at the Seattle Art Museum, the Drawing Center, New York, and in the People’s Biennial (traveling). Lesperance’s work is represented in the following public collections: the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum; the Museum of Art and Design; the Portland Art Museum; the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation; and at the Kadist Art Foundation. Lesperance has been honored with the northwest regional Betty Bowen Award, a Ford Family Fellowship in the Arts, an Art Matters Grant, a Robert Rauschenberg “Artist-as-Activist” Travel Grant, and a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant. She received her MFA from Rutgers University in 1999 and has received residencies at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture; the MacDowell Colony; the Djerassi Foundation; and the Atlantic Center for the Arts. Her work has been featured in Frieze, AnOther, ArtUS, Art Monthly, Cura, GARAGE, Guernica, Intercourse, the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, the Oregonian, and Tema Celeste.
Johannes Lund (Copenhagen), is a composer and artist who focuses on sound and performance. In 2001 Lund founded yoyooyoy, a music collective, with fellow musicians Andreas Führer, Anders Meldgaard and Toke Mortensen. His musical collaborations include; Fjernsyn Fjernsyn, Slütspürt, Yoke & Yohs, g.e.k., Forkert and Sumo Freunds. In 2010 he co-founded the Copenhagen venue for experimental and extreme music, Mayhem. Mayhem has gained international attention and has become a centre for the experimental music scene in Denmark. Lund has participated in the Cornelius Cardew Festival, 20012, exhibitions at Louisiana Museum, Charlottenburg Kunsthal, 44 Møen, among others.
Alison O’Daniel (Los Angeles), weaves narrative between cinema and object-making. Her projects engage scoring, music-making, and captioning, and are often built upon serendipitous misunderstandings. She is particularly interested in the poetic possibility within the inevitable gaps of information between subject, object, and the aural world, creating a form of exploded storytelling that emerges between bodies of work and bodies of audience members. Her previous feature-length film Night Sky premiered at the Anthology Film Archive in conjunction with Performa 11, New York. Her work has been screened and exhibited at The Aspen Museum of Art, MOCAD, NYU, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Museum of Jurassic Technology, High Desert Test Sites, Samuel Freeman Gallery, L.A. Louver, and other venues. She has received grants from the Rema Hort Mann Foundation, Art Matters, the Franklin Furnace Fund and the California Community Foundation. Writing about her work has appeared in ArtForum, the L.A. Times, and ArtReview. She is currently working on The Tuba Thieves, an experimental, narrative film and series of sculptures based on commissioned musical scores. She will present solo exhibitions at Centre d’Art Contemporain Passerelle, Brest, France in September, 2015 and at Art In General, NYC in Jan, 2016.
ABOUT THE CURATOR Chiara Giovando is a Los Angeles-based curator and artist. She received a BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute and a MFA from California Institute of the Arts. Giovando has a diverse portfolio; she curated Sound Structures in San Francisco, a series that recreated indeterminacy scores ranging from early Japanese Fluxus works to Steve Reich’s Pendulum Music. This spring she curated In Search of an Author at the Unge Kunstneres Samfund in Oslo, Norway. Other recent projects include The Third Ear, an exhibition of new sound art curated as part of the Fellows of Contemporary Art Curators Lab Award, and Thousand Points of Light, a site-works and residency program founded by Giovando in Joshua Tree, CA. Prior to accepting the Curator-in-Residence position at Disjecta, Giovando was Co-Director and Curator at Human Resources L.A. for two years. In 2013 she was invited to arrange a score for the Calder Quartet at the Barbican in London based on Christian Wolff’s work Edges 1969. In 2012 she was awarded a research fellowship with German collector and curator René Block that culminated inHammer Without a Master: Henning Christiansen’s Archive, an exhibition that included fourteen artists and composers as well as archival material.
ABOUT THE PROGRAM The Curator-in-Residence program provides an opportunity for emerging local and national curatorial talent to develop and expand the scope of their practice through a one-year residency. During their season, curators engage with a broad range of artists to create a series of exhibitions in Disjecta’s dynamic 3,500-square-foot space. Past Curators-in-Residence include Rachel Adams (2014-15), Summer Guthery (2013-14), Josephine Zarkovich (2012-13), and Jenene Nagy (2011-12). More information can be found here. Disjecta’s Curator-in-Residence program is funded in part by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and the Meyer Memorial Trust.
REVIEWS: http://dailyserving.com/2015/10/book-of-scores-at-disjecta/ http://www.opb.org/artsandlife/article/on-view-book-of-scores-at-disjecta/ http://www.wweek.com/arts/2015/10/27/the-book-of-scores-reviewed/