Thursday, May 5, 7 pmSanta Barbara Contemporary Arts ForumFREE
Carmina Escobar explores the concept of identity in her performance installation A White Room. Her performance is permeated with her voice, which functions as a primary instrument layered over a sonic landscape. Escobar’s work involves real-time processing of her voice to construct a narrative of the self in a space. The space is itself constructed with delayed, filtered, and sampled field recordings, found objects, and images collected over the period of a year.
Mexico City-native Carmina Escobar is a singer and multimedia artist, whose work explores opera as well as medieval, contemporary, folk, and electronic music. Experimental trends involving interdisciplinary collaborations, performance art, and multimedia are also hallmarks of her work. Though Los Angeles-based, Escobar has performed internationally in the Mexican Republic, USA, and Europe.
About the Forum Lounge Series: Forum Lounge is a series of free, unique, performance-based events, ranging from the theatrical to the avant-garde that are normally found only in large metropolitan venues, and that reflect CAF’s mission to sustain and encourage the artistic process by presenting art in the form of exceptional music, dance, video, and other multi-media to our community.
Support for Forum Lounge is generously provided by: Andrea Lang Fund, Daniel Clark, Endevermusic Productions, the Franciscan Inn, KCSB, Santa Barbara Independent, Santa Barbara Winery, and Therese Schweidler. Forum Lounge is presented in association with the Santa Barbara Downtown Organization’s 1st Thursday.
Curator's Notes:
For this season of Forum Lounge, I wanted to particularly focus on providing a diverse selection of performance pieces that explore a range of genres: music, theater, puppetry, dance, etc. And while the majority of Forum Lounge events rely on a multimedia and interdisciplinary format (that is, combining two or more of these genres with electronic media), there is still that distinct tie to the original form of expression. For this month's Forum Lounge, I am pleased to present Carmina Escobar, a Mexican-born artist who relies on her training in vocal performance and composition to present what she describes as a "sonic landscape"--a hyper-stylized surround sound of noise (both ambient and vocal) that relies on digital filters and improvisation. Carmina's work is greatly informed by her varied knowledge of contemporary music, opera, medieval music, folk music, and electronic music; as such, her performance spans both the traditional performing arts and the emerging technology of multimedia practices.
Forum Lounge: Eric Lindley, with Chi-wang Yang and Yelena Zhelezov, The Live-Long Day
The Live-Long Day is a collaborative musical and object play performance that traverses into bleak territory exploring the lives of submarine inhabitants who have lived underwater for generations. The
performers highlight and include techniques of theatrical and popular
music, abstract object play, experimental text, theatrical arcs of
movement, and audience relations into the story.
Eric
Lindley is an artist, writer, and musician primarily active in LA and
New York. His work explores the ramifications of scientific and social
research on personal human relationships with other individuals,
societies, and selves and has been performed internationally at venues
such as The Knitting Factory (NYC), REDCAT, and The Royal College of
Music (UK). Yelena Zhelezov is a Belarusian-Israeli visual artist and
puppeteer based in Los Angeles whose work has shown at such venues as
the Museum of Jurassic Technology and the Hammer Museum. Chi-wang Yang
is a Los Angeles-based theater director and interdisciplinary artist,
and founding member of video performance collective Cloud Eye Control.
His work has been presented internationally, including the Fusebox
Festival, EXIT Festival (France), and the San Francisco International
Film Festival.
Support for Forum Lounge is generously provided by: Andrea Lang Fund, Endevermusic Productions, the Franciscan Inn, KCSB, Santa Barbara Winery, and the Santa Barbara Independent. Forum Lounge is presented in association with the Santa Barbara Downtown Organization’s 1st Thursday.
FREE
Curator's Notes:
I'm excited to introduce writer/musician EricLindley, puppeteer Yelena Zhelezov, and theater director Chi-Wang Yang for April's Forum Lounge performance. The production originally included artist and puppeteer Katie Shook, who I met as part of Susan Simpson's ensemble last year and then invited to participate in Forum Lounge with her collaborative partner Eric. Katie--who is due to have her first child any day--passed along the project to Eric, and I'm thrilled to welcome him, Yelena and Chi-Wang (who incidentally is part of the performance ensemble, Cloud Eye Control, which includes March Forum Lounge artist Miwa Matreyek) to CAF. After Susan's intriguing performance last spring featuring an actor and object play with live video feed, I was excited to include an additional performance exploring the genre of puppetry and its many contemporary manifestations. When we think of puppetry in the traditional sense, we imagine small objects that emulate human characteristics; Eric's interpretation of puppetry is more conceptual, using abstract object play, experimental text, and music to weave a theatrical narrative that is purposely untraditional and largely metaphorical. And while this version of puppetry may delightfully unexpected, it still retains the mesmerizing power of storytelling.
CAF is a non-profit, non-collecting institution dedicated to exhibiting the highest quality of contemporary art while recognizing "the artists of tomorrow," and was founded in 1976 by artists and art supporters seeking a venue dedicated solely to contemporary art. What once began as a grassroots, artist-run organization with nominal funding now serves as the leading contemporary arts presenter in Central California. CAF offers its innovative education and exhibition programming to the region primarily free of charge. There is no admission fee because CAF believes that the arts should be accessible to all audiences of all persuasions. It truly is foundations and individuals from the community that keep CAF active, inspired and alive with opportunities for artists, children, and adults to experience all the visual and performing arts have to offer.
