WGXC-90.7 FM

Groundswell 2015

Sep 19, 2015: 1pm- 5pm
Olana State Historic Site

5720 Route 9G | Hudson, NY 12534 | 518-828-0135
http://www.olana.org/

Groundswell 2015 Image

Groundswell 2015 Image. Photograph by Alon Koppel. (Jul 01, 2015)

Gambletron installation at Groundswell, 2015

Gambletron installation at Groundswell, 2015. Photographed by Alon Koppel Photography. (Sep 15, 2015)

BUY TICKETS HERE: http://groundswell2015.brownpapertickets.com
General admission is $20 in advance, or $30 day of the event.

The Olana Partnership and Wave Farm’s WGXC 90.7-FM are pleased to co-present a third iteration of their award-winning exhibition event Groundswell. On Saturday September 19, 2015, hundreds will converge at Olana State Historic Site for site-specific performance and works and in sound, installation, broadcast, and movement.

We are delighted to announce the 2015 participating artists who reflect on and react to Olana and its integral viewshed as an ambitious and early environmental work: John Cage Trust with Seth Chrisman, John Cleater, Brian Dewan, Gambletron, Tyson Hauf, Bernd Klug, LoVid, Douglas Irving Repetto, and Quintron.

Olana’s 250-acre landscape was originally designed in response to its essential and spectacular views—the “Olana Viewshed”--by Hudson River School artist Frederic Church. On September 19, during this one-day exhibition event, audiences will explore the property’s undiscovered roads and naturalistic scenes as they encounter each project site. Picnicking will take place at a breathtaking clearing, which overlooks the Hudson River, the Catskill Mountains and beyond. The event will culminate with a performance by the renowned performing artist and inventor Quintron.

Groundswell installations and performances will be sited along Olana’s historic Ridge Road. When Church created this road, he famously wrote: “I can make more and better landscapes in this way than by tampering with canvas and paint in the studio.” While passing through native woodlands and recently restored meadows, participants will interact with the artists, Olana’s artist-designed landscape and its iconic viewshed, which is largely intact due to ongoing protection efforts. Since it was saved from destruction in 1966, Frederic Church’s Olana has evolved to represent a particularly American mix of preservation, art and environmentalism.

Food and drink will be available for purchase from Daughters Fare and Ale, of Red Hook, NY. Stationed at the picnic area overlooking the Rip Van Winkle Bridge, Daughters will offer an assortment of delicious, handmade sandwiches, salads, ale, wine, and more.

Rain date: Sunday, September 20, 2015

Groundswell 2015 Participating Artists:

The John Cage Trust, established in 1993 to gather, organize, preserve, disseminate, and further the work of the late American composer John Cage, maintains sizable collections of music, text and visual art manuscripts, as well as extensive audio, video and print libraries. Currently housed at Bard College, where Executive Director Laura Kuhn serves as John Cage Professor of Performance Arts, the Trust has embarked on a number of progressive, proactive projects and collaborations designed to contribute to the continuing relevance of Cage’s work. At Groundswell, Seth Chrisman will perform in collaboration with the Trust. Chrisman is a musician and multimedia artist based in the Hudson Valley, NY. His work explores texture, repetition, and scale, while being rooted in concepts of place. Extended techniques, location recordings, and radio receptions are woven together to create undulating sonic environments.

Educated and trained as an architect, John Cleater is an artist who experiments with spatial experience. He is a founding member of the internationally acclaimed multi-media performance group The Builders Association. His projects encompass a wide range of intentions and processes—from translating volumes of sound into physical volumes of space to projection-mapping onto objects and buildings. Cleater’s work blurs the threshold between physical and virtual space using a range of technologies including heat, laser, motion and camera recognition sensors that trigger audio and visual projections. Most recently Cleater is using augmented reality (AR) to blur this threshold.

Brian Dewan is a visual artist and musician based in Catskill, NY who is interested in storytelling and off-the-beaten-path histories. With a background in art, organ, music composition, and electronic music, Dewan often employs a home-built electric zither as accompaniment to his original songs well as collected folk material, which he performs live at various nightclubs, galleries, and museums. His I-CAN- SEE filmstrips combine projected color illustrations with music and the voice of an authoritative narrator, and have been screened at the Whitney Museum, the Brooklyn Museum, the New Museum and the Museum Of Jurassic Technology.

Gambletron is an interdisciplinary sonic performance artist and musician based out of Montréal, Canada. She is known for her noise-electronic improvisation, her extended multi AM Radio Theremin, roving radio-transmitted “Field Trips” and experimental “Noise Karaoke.” She creates glitch-based, textural soundscapes with references to dance using lo-fi circuit bent toys, found objects, home-made mics, cheap synths, radios and other types of homemade electronics.

Tyson Hauf resides in Upstate New York, near the foothills of the Catskill Mountains. His visual, performance, and sound-based work reanimates discarded objects, transforming already-used utilitarian objects and refuse into end-times totems or renderings of end-times characters. Key themes in his work include joy, transformation of sickness into health, deterioration, disparity, alienation, rust, industry, roots, altered states of consciousness and post-rapture spiritual economy.

Bernd Klug is an Austrian-born, Brooklyn-based sound artist and double bassist. In sound installations and solo concerts, his music encounters our everyday circumstances as found forms and questions our perceptions of sound and social space. His installations make use of acoustic phenomena like feedback, room frequencies and electromagnetic waves, and explore strings, wood, metal and other materials as audiovisual components.

LoVid is an art-duo comprised of Tali Hinkis and Kyle Lapidus, incorporating Hinkis’ background in fine art and video together with Lapidus’ experience with technology and music, as well as his work as a neuroscientist. Throughout their projects, LoVid explores the ways technology seeps into individual and collective consciousness, shaping perceptions of the body, a sense of place, and the natural world. Their works incorporate video, sound, textile, participatory events, book-art, and net-art, often including playful and tactile elements and juxtaposing analog and digital engineering with traditional art or craft forms that celebrate a “Do It Yourself” (DIY) philosophy and aesthetic.

Douglas Irving Repetto is an artist and teacher whose work includes sculpture, installation, performance, recordings, and software. He is the founder of a number of art/community-oriented groups including dorkbot: people doing strange things with electricity, ArtBots: The Robot Talent Show, organism: making art with living systems, and the music-dsp mailing list and website. Repetto teaches at Columbia University, where he is the director of the Sound Arts MFA program in the School of the Arts and Computer Music Center.

Quintron has been making genre-defying noise, soundscape, and house-rocking dance music in New Orleans for over 20 years. The majority of his full-length albums have the psychedelic soul of New Orleans party jams as filtered through tough distorted organs and a junk heap of self-made electronic instruments. Quintron helped to foster a DIY analog synth revival with a patented instrument called the DRUM BUDDY, a light-activated analog drum machine which creates murky, low-fidelity, rhythmic patterns triggered by the rotation of recycled #10 pizza sauce cans, as well as Weather Warlock, a weather-controlled analog drone synthesizer and live improvisational project of the same name.

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About Olana and The Olana Partnership

The eminent Hudson River School painter Frederic Edwin Church (1826-1900) designed Olana, his family home, studio, and estate as an integrated environment embracing architecture, art, landscape, and conservation ideals. Considered one of the most important artistic residences in the United States, Olana is a 250-acre artist-designed landscape with a Persian-inspired house at its summit, embracing unrivaled panoramic views of the vast Hudson Valley. Olana State Historic Site, a historic site administered by the New York State Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation, Taconic Region, is a designated National Historic Landmark and one of the most visited sites in the state. The Olana Partnership, a private not-for-profit education corporation, works cooperatively with New York State to support the restoration, development and improvement of Olana State Historic Site. http://olana.org

About Wave Farm and WGXC 90.7-FM

Wave Farm is a non-profit arts organization that celebrates creative and community use of media and the airwaves. Wave Farm programs provide access to transmission technologies and support artists and organizations that engage with media as an art form. WGXC, a program division of Wave Farm, is a creative community radio station based in New York’s Greene and Columbia counties. Hands-on access and participation activate WGXC as a public platform for information, experimentation, and engagement on 90.7-FM. http://wavefarm.org

Groundswell is co-organized by The Olana Partnership and Wave Farm. Picnic delectables and libations provided by Daughters Fare and Ale. Solar-powered performance amplification provided by Lotus Energy. Groundswell is made possible in part by Wave Farm Program Support from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Arts and the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature. The Olana Partnership would also like to acknowledge generous support from David Kermani. Photo: Alon Koppel. This year's benefactor tickets ($250) include admission for two people to Groundswell, a picnic lunch with wine from Daughters Fare & Ale, and invitation to an Artists' Reception for Groundswell Benefactors, which will take place from 6 to 8 p.m. on August 18, at Olana State Historic Site.