VB Previz #58 - Net / Work - I Rez, Therefore I Am

VB31 – Demo Days was the brain child of Queen of Demo, Agnes Sharple. Then our gallerist Xue Faith had the inspired idea to invite kinetic / light artist Sledge Roffo to install a half dozen works at Gallery Xue / Palestine as a sort of landscape for our Demo performance.

The compelling resonance between the demo avatars and the kinetic landscape has finally pushed me into action on a collaboration I’ve thought about for a while: creating a tableaux vivant of avatars draped in Kai Heideman’s primary color unitards, and set in the spectral splendor of a Betty Tureaud landscape.

A while ago Tureaud and I spoke about a collaboration in a smaller space. Meanwhile, out of the turbulence on the West Bank that witnessed the destruction and rebuilding of Gallery Xue / Palestine, Xue Faith and Trill Zapatero collaborated (conspired? 🙂 to launch Gallery Xue / Kandahar and they brought Tureaud in to start on a much larger landscape for this performance.

I had a few titles in mind for this collaboration when I shot a simple bit of test video in Tureaud’s landscape. “Net / Work” really wasn’t one of them, but then I wanted to toss the test up on YouTube and went over to CC Mixter in search of a simple ambient track to use with it. Well, I found my ambient track… and more.

At CC Mixter I stumbled upon DJ Blue’s “Mind Field” featuring Colin Mutchler’s spoken word piece “A New System.” What was supposed to be “just an ambient track” for a “crappy test video” became a defining quality for the work.

The contemporariness of Mutchler’s words, and the sublime power of his voice, seemed to resonate marvellously with Tureaud’s spectral beams relentlessly sparking across the gap from earth to heaven. Once my sense of this work had been Mutchlerized, his sensibility seemed to be found in so many of Tureaud’s works, such as Your Tube or Lolipop

Gallery Xue / Kandahar stands in dramatic contrast to the more cosmopolitan spaces of Gallery Xue / NYC or Gallery Xue / London. The “magnificent desolation” of Gallery Xue / Kandahar’s desert mountains makes such an unexpectedly compelling counterpoint for Tureaud’s orgy of light and color.