Ground/Shift in the Illuminated Forest
Featuring performances by Jim Haynes, Lissom and Shores
Ground/Shift explores the Earth’s shifts and swells, from natural phenomenon to our inherent human connections. Artist Jim Haynes creates ‘Terminal’, based upon thermal vents, boiling springs, and geyser activity at the Lassen Volcano National Park. Haynes explores the beautiful alien and profoundly unsettling Lassen’s thermal vents, which effectively eradicate the Sierra woodland and replace it with a unique self-contained ecosystem of lichens, bacteria, plants, and insects tolerant of these seemingly inhospitable locales. Haynes amplifies the sublime nature of these sites, presenting a phenomological piece of expressionism with a variety of found objects like sand, rocks, rusted metal.
Sound and Video Artist Lissom conjures ‘Intrinsic’, a plurimedia meditation on the illusory boundaries between our environment and ourselves. Drawing from a collection of sounds and images that explore organic form and emptiness, it is designed to envelop us in a space where we can examine, and perhaps dissolve our dividing perceptions.
Shores (percussion, guitar, bass, effects, cymbals, vocals, electronics, turntables, didgeridoos) will be collaborating with filmmaker Jaakko Vilpponen to perform an audio-visual documentary on environmental experience. Set to film footage from Bay Area shorelines, this score will explore the relationship between human consciousness and natural environments. Its first movment “Reflection” explores preserved environments, and the effects they have upon us; the second movement “Refraction” surveys how polluted environments affect us, and we them. Shores conceives these processes as fundamental to the process of learning how to listen to Nature, how to open our electric selves and consciousness to the organic experience of an environment.
Using shortwave radio static, electric field disturbances, controlled feedback, and textural scrapings, Jim Haynes’ sound installations manifest a broken minimalism in which magnetic drones give the impression of timelessness within an active environment. Jim has exhibited at The Exploratorium (San Francisco), Westspace (Melbourne), Diapason (New York), Jack Straw Productions (Seattle), Works (San Jose), Eyedrum (Atlanta), The Fugitive Art Center (Nashville), and Varnish (San Francisco). As Editorial Director for 23five, a nonprofit organization dedicated to the developing increased awareness of sound art, Jim co-curated the 2003 San Francisco Electronic Music Festival and the Activating The Medium Festivals (2007 – 2010). He also has written extensively on sound art, noise culture, minimalism, and general music experimentation.
http://www.helenscarsdale.com/
Tana Sprague (Lissom) is a sound + video artist, transfixed with micro details. With focus fluctuating between digital and organic, her work creates a space where one complements the other. Inspired by the elegant complexity of organic forms, she utilizes various electronic and digital devices to synthesize a similar enveloping intricacy manipulating the awareness of time, space, place and scale. Her foundation in electronic music, and new media theory and practice was constructed at the University of California at San Diego with a BA in Interdisciplinary Computing and the Arts and at Mills College with a MFA in Electronic Music and Recording Media. Since 2004, Tana has worked alongside Recombinant Media Lab’s founder and Director Naut Humon and most recently as its Associate Director. With RML and Grey Area Foundation For The Arts agreeing to merge, Tana is now Director of Operations at GAFFTA.
http://www.sensory-perception.net
http://www.myspace.com/01lissome
Founding Shores member Jude Morris had been exploring its electroacoustic concept for over a decade. In his solo work under the artist name “Mythyc”, Jude had been developing an approach to soundscapes that integrated experimental turntablism, sampling, and electronic compositions. In May 2009, Jude approached his friend and bassist Will Pritikin (The Thralls) with jazz and improvisation background, with the idea of forming a full band. Soon thereafter, Alex Darr, didjeridoo and percussion player, joined with experience in outdoor performances and a keen interest in experimental instruments. Guitarist Nathan Ladd (Neon Freeze, Dream Distortion) filled out the original band shortly after and recruited its final member Sean Degaetano (Dora Flood, Mellow Drunk, Also Round) to perform on drums, percussion, saw, and acoustic guitar bow.
http://weareshores.blogspot.com/
http://www.myspace.com/weareshores
