Anxious Spaces: Performance Festival 2015

Anxious Spaces: Installation as Catalyst is Clocktower's annual performance and installation festival that introduces a new generation of artists who are based in New York, partner regularly with alternative event spaces and collectives throughout Brooklyn and beyond, and utilize installation work as a platform for performance. The exhibition brings a dynamic selection of these artists onto Knockdown Center's dramatic compound for a month of on-site development, and kicks off the exhibition with a July 5, 2015 celebration of the work and its fluid transformation from environment to stage. RSVP: HERE The opening event features live presentations by Aurora Halal, Lucas Abela, and Prince Rama, who use video, sculpture, and sound artwork in site-specific installations at Knockdown Center as a point of departure for their exploratory performances. Anxious Spaces exhibits and installations by Will Ryman, Molly Lowe, Tim Bruniges, Aurora Halal, Lucas Abela, Prince Rama, Audra Wolowiec, and Ben Mortimer are on view at Knockdown Center through July 26, Saturdays and Sundays, from 2 to 6pm. Or by appointment. More on the installations and performances: Will Ryman presents Cadillac, a life-sized, 1958 Eldorado Biarritz convertible fabricated entirely out of resin and Bounty paper towels. Measuring 82” x 224” x 78”, Cadillac juxtaposes two iconic American brands: one, a post-war symbol of luxury, class, and power and the other, a mass-produced disposable product, revered for its convenience. Molly Lowe installs Growth, a sound/video piece and garden environment that draws the viewer out of the sun and into the darkness. It is a hypnotizing, heightened space where external and internal worlds fester in limbo. Here, viewers are invited to sit on a mysterious patch of grass and watch the miraculous minutiae of plant life grow, magnified on screen in a most sinister alien way. Formed by a set of portable stand-alone single beat organic-analogue drum machines, Lucas Abela's installation, IV:BPM, is made from medical intravenous drip equipment pedals, made possible with support from Death By Audio pedals, and wired to audio gear to generate overlapping complex surround polyrhythms. The public engages with the composition in three ways: by adjusting the IV nozzles to change the BPM, manipulating audio effects to augment the audio, and shifting the IV stands within the space to alter the mix. These participatory elements turn the installation into an instrument/drum machine orchestra, performed en mass by attendees and an organized procession on the day of the event. Using the IV:BPM installation as a backdrop, Abela presents his infamous performance, in which the artist purses his lips against sheets of amplified glass, employing various vocal techniques ranging from throat singing to raspberries, turning the discarded shards into crude musical instruments. The results are a wild array of cacophonous noise that is strangely controlled and oddly musical. Tim Bruniges presents Normalize (the pull of the earth), a site-responsive sound and sculptural installation engaging material tension and acoustic resonance within the architecture of Knockdown Center. Through the use of non-traditional sound (re)production forms, this installation explores the agency of sound as an atemporal and regenerative, autonomous entity. The installation is developed through an artist-in-residence collaboration with SIGNAL, Brooklyn. Aurora Halal takes over a subterranean annex at Knockdown Center, transforming the space into a veritable dream-world. Darkly lit, in a surreal, hallucinatory way, a floating video is projected onto transparent screens, cloaking the mysterious cave in holographic effects. The video projection is a suspended moment in time, a kind of cubist video painting, in which the subject is filmed and shown from every angle. As visitors to the space immerse themselves in the room, they discover the film to be a motion study of a human figure, exploring the limitless possibilities of its form. The piece includes a 4-channel audio composition of panning, paranoid soundscapes created with Daniel Martin-McCormick. In an off-site ruin at the Maspeth space, Prince Rama present Fountain of Youth 11:11, a mythical water installation and schizo-temporal paradise. Inspired by the Tarkovskian image of beauty and immortality, the crumbling brick walls of the roofless structure are set against the bizarrely decadent, Edenic environment, echoing the fabled chamber in Tarkovsky's Stalker where innermost desires are fulfilled. The mysterious elixir of Prince Rama's fountain of youth flows from discarded cans of Monster Energy, while two stone sculptures of Hebe, the Greek goddess of youth, flank the entrance, confronting passersby with an elusive invitation to partake in the subaqueous magic. Audra Wolowiec installs Concrete Sound, a modular series of cast concrete forms based on the geometric shapes of sound foam used in recording studios and anechoic chambers. Normally used to control sound, the shift in materiality does the opposite, refusing the intended function to instead create unsettling, muted landscapes. The work commissioned for Knockdown Center is a wall relief of a single panel that accumulates to form a large grid. While the work is directly related to sound, the strong geometric lines also call upon grids found in textiles, architecture, and industrial landscapes. Ben Mortimer's One and the Other is an energetic play between chaotic violence and highly controlled structure. A wall of shattered glass evokes a shaft of light, slashing down from the ceiling across the room, while splintered wood erupts from the floor to capture it. Seemingly dangerous and unstable, the fractured elements are arranged according to a highly stable, intrinsic logic. Common building materials, often used in sculpture and installation art and typically concealed to hide their utilitarian baseness, here are celebrated for their unique properties. Anxious Spaces Food Menu by Trough Catering : Hunan-style Cold Noodles - Cold linguini served with a spicy, salty, tangy peanut sauce and topped with crunchy greens. Mezze Platter- A combo plate of Mediterranean salads (hummus, tzatziki, red cabbage salad, tabbouleh, roasted red pepper salad, feta cheese, pickles, and stuffed grape leaves) served with pita bread. Loukaniko- Unbelievably succulent Greek pork-leek sausages served on warm pita bread with tzatziki. Espresso Chip Cookies- A classic chocolate chip cookie with pepped up with a shot of espresso. The July 5th event requests a suggested donation of $7-15, on a sliding scale. 5-10 p.m.