Ursula Scherrer, afloat
The artist Ursula Scherrer presents an extended form installation event for one night only featuring a near-holographic, animated, multiple projection video environment and a live soundtrack performed by percussionist Brian Chase (Yeah, Yeah, Yeahs) and bassist Kato Hideki (of the Tokyo and New York noise scenes). The event is a steady-state, durational, evolution of time, space, light, and sound and visitors are invited to attend any portion of the four-hour event: linger, come and go, or absorb it all.
Suggested donation $8-15.
Ursula Scherrer is a Swiss artist living in New York City. Her work has been shown in festivals, galleries and museums internationally. Her aesthetic training began with dance, transitioned to choreography and expanded to photography, video, text and mixed media.
The poetic quality of Scherrer's video work is one of moving paintings, drawing the viewer into the images. She transforms spaces and landscapes into serene, abstract portraits of rhythm, color and light - inner landscapes in the outside world where the images have less to do with what we see than with the feeling they leave
Scherrer has worked with the composers/musicians Shelley Hirsch, Michelle Nagai, Brian Chase, John Duncan, Kato Hideki, Flo Kaufmann, David Watson, Michael J. Schumacher, Valerio Tricoli among others, in the creation of video and sound installations, live performances and single-channel videos. She has collaborated with the choreographers Liz Gerring, Sally Silvers and Susanne Braun as well as the light artist Kurt Laurenz Theinert. Together with Katherine Liberovskaya, Scherrer organizes OptoSonic Tea, a series dedicated to the convergence of live visuals to live sounds.
About the Pioneer Works Clocktower installation/performance Scherrer has written:
A black space. Time disappears. Space disappears. Movement is imperceptible.
Scherrer, Chase and Hideki are creating a space of floating sounds and images, the visible becomes invisible, the invisible becomes visible.
It is not about what the viewer sees and hears, it is about the feeling the images and sounds provoke, that which is beyond the surface.
A seemingly floating, structure of semitransparent black fabric that has sparkles woven into it is hanging in the space. The black absorbs the image, the image disappears. The silver sparkle within the black makes the image visible.
The audience is invited to sit and lie on the floor.
The images are organic shapes filmed in nature and architecture, abstracted to extract the essence of them. Sometimes the images and sounds become very active and there are times of no sound and no image. The artists are holding the space.
The space is a space of pure being, a space where the audience feels comfortable to float, letting themselves go, loosing themselves in, loosing touch with time. There is a feeling of no gravity. The sounds are hanging in mid air. There is a moment when time dissolves.
When the visitors leave they have no idea if they stayed for 10 min. or several hours.
There is nothing happening and yet so much. A dream that becomes reality, reality that becomes a dream.
Other works by Scherrer and company:
Long duration video and sound installation Bologna Italy 2013
http://www.ursulascherrer.com/projects/narcomantic.html
Giant LED wall projection in Seoul South Korea 2012
http://www.ganamplanet.com/index.php?/project-2012/media-art-from-switzerland/