Crystal Cavern install detail at Clocktower Gallery 2012, photo Samuel Huber

Crystal Cavern Opening Reception

Serra Victoria Bothwell Fels' Crystal Cavern opens November 13th and continues to grow over the next weeks as more and more crystals, lights and sounds are added by Fels and collaborators VnessWolfCHild and Terence Caulkins. Field recordings made by VnessWolfCHild in and around the Clocktower have been sculpted into three dimensional structures and trajectories by Caulkins, reflecting the geometric structures of Fels' crystals. Visitors are invited to come bathe in this sonic sculpture installed inside the Cavern.

On the day of the reception,VnessWolfCHild and Planets Around The Sun perform a live sound piece within the Clocktower.

The reception starts November 13th 6pm no admittance after 7pm. RSVP is required to events@artonair.org
Other project rooms and exhibits also on view including Shoplifter's Nervescape and A Taylor Kuffner's Gamelatron.

Serra Victoria Bothwell Fels is a Tennessean-Australian-American based in Brooklyn. From discarded housing materials, she makes large-scale construction installations that are submerging environments built into existing architecture with a sense of placelessness, awkward entrances, and inviting nooks. Her work abstracts structures made up of layers and layers of other like structures, and explores how specific qualities of constructed environments create experiential constructs.

Serra Victoria Bothwell Fels, Crystal Cavern

Serra Victoria Bothwell Fels (b. 1982, Tennessee) is an Australian-American artist based in Brooklyn. She creates large-scale installations inspired by fantastical blueprint drawings that abstract and compress representations of family systems. Utilizing geometry in ways akin to Sierpinski fractals or crystal structures, where larger wholes are made from smaller repeating components, Serra uses triangles as a process of mapping the thousands of genealogical connections that make up our beings. The installations born from these maps are made from discarded housing materials—predominately lath wood found behind old plaster walls—to make environmental outgrowths in the nooks and crannies of existing architecture. Her work has been shown at Pioneer Works, The Clocktower Gallery, Scope, and the Palais de Tokyo in Paris; and with her collective Rabid Hands in a former convent, a crumbling machine warehouse, and an abandoned secret society hall.

Serra Victoria Bothwell Fels, VnessWolfCHild & Terence Caulkins: Crystal Cavern

In the midst of their whirlwind installation at the Clocktower Gallery, artist Serra Victoria Bothwell Fels and her collaborators VnessWolfCHild and Terence Caulkins sit down with Joe Ahearn to discuss their work as installation and sound artists. They also discuss collective focus on collaboration, and the upcoming exhibition at the Clocktower entitled Crystal Caverns. The conversation covers the breakthrough group show that brought them together (entitled Sequence of Waves), the act of recording the vibrations of neutrinos from deep within the earth and the magic of massive crystals growing underneath Mexico.

Planets Around the Sun & VnessWolfCHild (Live)

Recordings from the opening reception for Serra Victoria Bothwell Fels' 2012 Crystal Cavern installation at the Clocktower that features music by VnessaWolfCHild, Planets Around the Sun, and sound and light design by Terence Caulkins. VnessWolfCHild (Vanessa Cronan) calls herself an Interactive Ritual Healing Performance Artist. Living outside Philadelphia, she is part of Dawn of the Universe; a former member of Wildway, a music collaboration with Adriana Atema; and member of the art collective, Rabid Hands, who make experiential art/music "situations". Planets Around the Sun is a psychedelic, noise, far-out folk band of visual and sound artists from Maine. NOTE: This program is posted in two parts so listeners can use their media player to jump quickly from one set to the other.