this: moment - missives from another world S T I L L M O V E
this: moment
missives from another world
photographs l Bob Raymond
S T I L L M O V E
installation l Wenxiong Lin
June 21 - July 19 , 2009
opening reception June 21, 3 - 7pm
Studio Soto at Thompson Design Group
35 Channel Center Street, corner
gallery hours Fri 4 - 7; Sat 2 - 5; Sun 2 - 5
Organizations and artists need documentation of their work for their own records, and for their own sake. When the medium is performance and other time-based arts, documents may be the only thing that exists afterwards. Re-contextualizing documentation as a final form is a cottage industry of recomposition and reflection, generating debate. Yet if the document didn’t exist there would be a lot less to talk about, and though our memories may be rich, the field would be barren.
When Mobius Artists Group member Bob Raymond began documenting Mobius events, his primary intention was to provide a record of the organization’s work that could be drawn from to use as support materials needed for grant applications. Some of the uses and actions grew, in providing images for the artists, with other activities such as publicity stills for upcoming works. Counted alone, by photographing performances and installations in 35mm slide film (and to some extant 35mm BW negative) from the early eighties until the early 2000’s switch to a digital camera, Mobius, through Bob’s work, amassed a collection of slides estimated conservatively at over 10,000 in number. These slides and other materials have also been numbered, archived and stored by Bob, as well as over 15,000 digital images since the changeover to digital media.
This exhibition came about when Bob Raymond brought some new archival prints he’d been making to a meeting. Their quality, care, and presence carry the ghost of the event as surely as the event performed itself. And there was and is still a particular Raymond protocol, all the more impressive considering the results it yielded. His protocol gave complete respect to the performer’s focus, avoiding the possibility of breaking it, for first of all, he never used a flash inside Mobius’ black-box space and its twenty years of performances there. Secondly, he avoided all shutter clicks, especially during quiet moments, lest that too adversely affect the performer as well as the audience. Without a flash, he relied on long exposures in primarily low light conditions. There are, often, trails of movement as a result. But also as often, there is the stillness needed to register the image in focus, and something delicately in between as well. Raymond’s knack for capturing moments, some in high tension and in process is clear here.
Bob Raymond also took his documenting a creative step further than most. To me, one of the distinguishing features of the work is how he works in detail as well. An image that probably would not convey the scope or general appearance may on the other hand reveal an important feature, or be framed in such a vital way that it gives its subject broader amplification inside its forms, yielding a new one. That insight is among the artist’s gifts he has brought to this collection and to the Mobius archive.
Mobius’ archive, which contains Bob’s work and also documentation from others in the Mobius community, is on the move, too. One local university, building a new digital archives laboratory, has proposed using the Mobius archive as its project for graduate student interns. Another university is now considering housing the entire Mobius archives, including paper, film, video and sound documents, with Bob Raymond’s images the centerpiece of it.
I wouldn’t know, but I would like to guess, that in our time there is no other photographer with the record of commitment and continuity Bob Raymond has through his 28 years of documenting Mobius. I think it’s high time the body of work of this artist and photographer be seen, noticed, and acknowledged. And I hope this exhibition advances that inevitability sooner.
Jed Speare, 6/09
Bob Raymond is a long-time member of the Mobius Artists Group. He is an intermedia artist who has worked in many forms of electronic visual and aural media. In the past, he has engaged in performance,
installation, sound environment composition, video, and photography. He has been documenting (photographically and at times using video) the work of Mobius members and other experimental artists who might cross paths with Mobius since the early 1980's. He also maintains the photographic archives of Mobius, Inc. Until recently, he had worked for over 20 years as an engineering manager in the televisionindustry. He is now weighing his future options on a precise scale,
one by one. The floor of his workshop is littered with them.
Installation components of S T I L L M O V E
text by the artist
LEGEND (video)The inspiration of this short film could be retrospect to a popular monster story among students when I was in my early years. After more than twenty years, I composed this film with the assistance of my friends.
When time is involved, different experiences and thoughts might come from the same story. If, we say, a beautiful person’s back view and the curiosity of that person’s other side were the center of attention over 20 years ago, we might consider the figure in the pictures as scenery today.
“My shoes” series started in 2007, which includes my old shoes and sculptures and installations after the models of my old shoes. It seems to be a gaze or survey of myself and the outer world from me in another space.
My shoes (installation) One group is composed of shoes sculptures and salt. It seems the objects have lost gravity by the force of mind. It’s suspending and floating in the air. Or it’s moving but just couldn’t be seen by eyes. Still or moving becomes a kind of relativity here. Another group is composed of cloth and shoes. The length and shape are changeable according to the space.
My shoes (slide show) A series of pictures captured different moments. The pictures were taken outdoors in natural settings. Flowers, grass, trees, light and wind are all parts of the show. I tried my best to preserve all those pictures, for none of them are more important than the others. They just existed at a different moment. It’s a silent poem composed of paused or continuous pictures. It’s a fanciful flight after revival, a journey of spirit. The image projected on the wall seems like continuance and shift of time.
For this exhibition, I pay my respects to the people who stand facing hardship.
Born in Fujian, China
1989-1993 Attached School of Central Academy of Fine Art , Beijing China
1993-1998 Central Academy of Fine Art, Beijing China
2004 Moved to San Francisco Bay Area. Lived in Oakland.
2007 Moved to Boston
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R o b L i s t (Amsterdam)
2 s o l o s : N a t u r a M o r t a a n d F o l l y
Wednesday, April 29th 8:30 pm Studio Soto at Thompson Design Group 35 Channel Center St., corner suggested donation $10
Studio Soto is honored to host the first solo performances in Boston of renowned American/Dutch choreographer, Rob List. List has developed a unique personal style of movement related to ideas of minimalism, abstraction, and architecture. He performs with less of an intent to show his face in order to reduce the viewer's reading of emotion, while instead suggesting anonymity and an everyman sense of the figure in space, in the moment with the audience.
The performance is in conjunction with his recently completed exhibition at Studio Soto the past month, Rob List: Drawings About Movement, part of a series featuring multidisciplinary artists working across media. For more information about Rob List, visit http://www.studiosoto.org/artists/rob-list null and Rob List's website at www.ozu.nl
Natura Morta [1996]
This solo performance is the first in a series of movement pieces exploring underlying themes in the genre of painting known as 'still-life', in which objects such as flowers, food, instruments or ornaments are displayed on a table. These objects, while unmoving, can be filled with vitality, a living presence with a quality of immanence. The paradoxes in 'still life' are inherent in the term itself, as well as in its equivalent Latinate term 'natura morta'. 'Life/death, still/moving, natural/unnatural' are the themes of this movement performance - in which an anonymous figure stands behind a table with a vase of flowers and begins a journey which crosses all of these paradoxical boundaries. Performed in Amsterdam, Marseille, New York, Zurich, Tilburg, and Prague. Winner of the 1997 Netherlands VSCD Mime Prize.
Folly [2000]
This solo performance is the first in a series of "follies". Folly is an English word meaning "foolish action, undertaking or belief". It also refers to a form of landscape architecture, Follies were structures made by 18th century English and French gentry to enliven and demarcate their gardens - towers, obelisks, grottos, rustic monuments or other buildings - reflecting not only the obsessions of their creators but also their fascination with nature as something picturesque, frightening, or sublime. This movement performance explores the double meaning of folly: an absurd and vain act as well as a structure erected in a world of "howling wilderness".
In September a select few had a rare treat as the American expatriate Rob List performed one of his "Follies" at the Sideshow Gallery in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, in conjunction with the American Abstract Artists exhibition "Material Matter." With his tall, thin frame clad in a black suit, Mr. List sang a song, then had a haunting choreographic conversation with time, narrative and the gallery's smooth white walls. It passed too quickly. Like all these dances, it's a conversation that needs to resume, and soon.
- Claudia La Rocco, dance critic New York Times, December 23, 2007
This is a performance which calls up emotionally colored memories one cannot quite place. The act of performance itself might have begun like this - with just the body in space. Since then there has been so much added that it is extraordinary when a performer begins there again.'
- de groene amsterdammer
Rob List recently performed a piece from his Figure Series in an atelier with large windows outside town. The performance occured just at twilight, challenging the audience's perceptual capacities in following the minimal actions of the performer.The result was an hallucinatory experience with the audience becoming conscious of every movement in the space. Sometime the space itself seemed to change. The final result was a performance of great strength and beauty.'
- de neskrant
Sunday, April 26 through Sunday May 10
opening reception Sunday April 26 from 4 - 7 pm
gallery hours Fri. 4 - 7; Sat. and Sun. 12 - 5Join Studio Soto for a special exhibition of Yucef's Merhi's programmed poetry in two of his works, the Poetic Clock and Super Atari Poetry. Merhi is from Venezuela and views poetry as subversive by nature. Former projects include hacking into the email account of President Hugo Chavez; obtaining and reprogramming the source code of the first 3D
computer game ever made; appropriating the user’s database of a large
telecommunication company owned by Verizon, Inc; or getting and using the credit
card of the old British Artist, Damien Hirst.
Locally, he was featured in Aspect Magazine's Volume 11: ARTE DE LAS AMÉRICAS.
Super Atari Poetry (2005) is a multiplayer game installation consisting of 3 Atari 2600 consoles, joysticks, self-manufactured cartridges, and TV monitors. Each cartridge contains a database of verses that were written by Merhi. (For this exhibition, there is one console and player.) Players can move forward and backward the sentences or freeze/swap their shifting colors. The reading of the 3 verses printed on the screens produces an interactive and coherent poem that is always changing its meaning and chromatic structure. With Super Atari Poetry, participants can make about 1000 different poems. Here, programming language plays a major role in the construction and exhibition of poetry. Both, programming and natural language take part of the same experience. In order to build the game cartridges, sentences had to be translated from English to Assembler, also known as Machine Language. In contrast, the Atari interprets the code and displays an image that becomes language that people can understand and, once again, interpret.
Super Atari Poetry is an invitation to feel and celebrate the linkage between the history of media and the history of art; the nexus between programming language and natural language, technology and literature, videogame and poetry.
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The Poetic Clock (2000-08) is a digital clock that transforms time into poetry. It is comprised by 4 rows of text, wrote in Spanish and programmed in ActionScript, projected on a wall using a computer-connected video beam. Every time an hour changes a new sentence is printed on the first line. When a minute changes a sentence pops on the second line. The change of seconds is represented by the change of sentences on the third line. Finally, the fourth line shows the hour as HH:MM:SS .
The reading of the three verses produces an articulated and coherent poem; a poem that mutates each second, minute and hour; a poem that is continuously becoming another of itself, displaying through language the movement of time. As a result, the Poetic Clock generates 86.400 different poems every day.
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Statement
My work explores the connections between technology and semantics, delving into the boundless fluxes among natural and programming language. The comprehension of this duet led me to develop methods and machines in the form of software-based installations, Internet projects and video games; addressing social, political and philosophical issues.
In every project I produce the machine becomes an extension of the poem, expanding the potential of words and extending the limits of language; while poetry becomes a prolongation of the employed technology, providing an emotive and meaningful presence. This translation of poetry (natural language) into Java, C++, Flash ActionScript or Assembler (programming languages), turned out to be not only a challenge, but also a procedure to deal with the core of digital technology. The relation computer-poem that I outline attempts to redefine the role of the poet/coder and our experience of written poetry in our present.
Yucef Merhi
http://www.cibernetic.com
Julie Andrée T. - Landscape for the ones who get lost
an installation
March 13th to April 12th
Opening reception Friday March 13th, 5 – 8 pm
with performance by the artist;
closing performance Sunday, April 12th at 5pm
Rob List – Drawings About Movement, 1980 – 2000
March 13th – April 29
Closing reception Wednesday, April 29
with performance by artist, time tba
location: 35 Channel Center St., corner
Studio Soto at Thompson Design Group
gallery hours: Friday, 4 - 7 pm; Sat. and Sun. 12 - 5 pm
Studio
Soto is pleased to present two concurrent exhibitions with
internationally renowned artists Julie Andrée T., from Quebec City,
Quebec Canada, and Rob List from the Netherlands.
Julie Andrée
T. will present a new installation, “Landscape for the ones who get
lost,” in a 3.500 sq. ft. space where Studio Soto is in-residence at
Thompson Design Group. Rob List’s “Drawings About Movement, 1980-2000”
will be in a smaller brick project space with a selection of his work
on video there as well.
Both artists are widely known in other
genres: Andrée T. in performance art and List in choreography and
movement. Though Andrée T. has had numerous commissions for
installations, most of her work has taken place in an international
performance realm that has taken her to several continents. List is
known primarily in New York and abroad, where he worked prior to moving
to Amsterdam in 1985. His solo performances along with his Company Ozu
have had an enormous impact creatively and pedagogically in the
Netherlands and beyond. Not only a Dutch phenomenon, in late 2007, New
York Times dance critic Claudia La Rocco cited List’s performance of
“Folly” in New York that year as one of the year’s five best.
Both artists will be performing during the exhibitions. Julie Andrée T.
at the opening reception on March 13th and closing of her exhibition on
April 12th. Rob List will perform on Wednesday, April 29th.
Studio Soto is very honored to present these artists and grateful to Thompson Design Group for our residency. Julie Andrée T.'s exhibition and performance's are supported in part by the Délégation du Quebec, Boston.
more information on Julie Andrée T. here
more information on Rob List here
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