Ross Racine, "Left at Crystal Brook Boulevard" Opens This Friiday 7-9PM

Front Room Gallery is proud to present "Left at Crystal Brook Boulevard," a solo exhibition of new works on paper by Ross Racine. In this series Racine has added color to his palette, creating a layer of mystery and intrigue to his aerial depictions of fictional suburban communities. Racine is also working on a larger scale, allowing the viewer to be absorbed in the intricacies of his realistic and exaggerated infrastructure. This shift in scale and color allows Racine to further push the boundary between expected and unexpected, creating a sense of abstraction within realistic compositions.

Ross Racine creates his hyper-real suburban landscapes with a uniquely developed drawing method combining the languages of drawing and digital imaging. The importance of color varies greatly from image to image, as some images are saturated, some have subdued tints, and some revert back to pure gray scale. The decisions about color are made as each image evolves during the process of creation, and its final form is meant to reinforce a particular mood that matches the character of the landscape. 

Racine’s works on paper present realistic and structural layouts of invented subdivisions, which illustrate the insulated conditions common in these types of developments. Using an omniscient viewpoint from above, Racine creates intricate layouts of communities that are filled with nuanced detail. The aerial atmosphere of each work presents a particular mood that matches its character. 

In Racine's piece "Pleasant Hills," streets bend and swerve in all directions, revealing a vision of community where there are no straight lines, no parallels and no real divisions. There is an air of playfulness in the work; the shortest distance between two points is no longer the straight line, creating a world where rigidity and structure lose potency in the face of uninhibited creative exploration.

Ross Racine draws a cross section between the tangible reality of suburbia and the illusionary realm, concisely depicting the disconnection between desire and its actualization, questioning the feasibility and logic in fulfilling dreams of private space within a community, the luxury of easy access to stores and goods, a neighborly atmosphere, and the overarching attraction to "more."

Ross Racine is a recent recipient of the Canada Council for the Art Project grant, whose proceeds helped in the creation of a portion of the works presented in this exhibition.

Join us for an Evening of Performances May 3rd

7:30 Richard Kamerman and $am Pettigrew 
8:20 Duo
Kyungmi Lee and Mara Mayer
9:00 Duo
Plan 23 Trio (Peter Principle, Dok Gregory, and Jeremy D. Slater)

$am Pettigrew is a red bearded grizzly bear whose main weapon of choice is a tree (double bass), often augmented with a bow, a vibrator and metal poles. With this arsenal he dissects music/s, devours it/them, and spits it/them back out in a flurry of squeaky noise, drone, percussive whacks and silence. When not in bear mode, $am is a Co-Director of The NOW now, a co-conveyor of the Splinter Orchestra, a milk drinking performance artist, a bike tinker-er, and a coffee wanker/barista. To date $am has played music with a wide variety of artists form both the music world and the performance/dance scenes. $am currently resides in Marrickville, Sydney, where he has a room filled with cd’s.

Richard Kamerman prefers small sounds to large sounds but that doesn't mean they are always performed as quiet sounds. He also likes accidental sounds and collecting his instruments from people's trash on the street. He has no time for cigar breaks.

Kyungmi Lee
I'm a flute player based in Jersey city, NJ. I like to improvise. in kale elk, a duo with Elizabeth Kosack (keyboard, piano, mask maker) we play improvised music in masks and sometimes incorporate puppetry, theatrical and ritualistic elements to our shows. my formal training was at the Peabody Conservatory of music in classical performance and electroacoustic music.

Mara Mayer
Clarinetist and bass clarinetist Mara Mayer is the creator and curator of Home Audio, a house concert series in Brooklyn dedicated to new music. A graduate of the Eastman School of Music, she performs with ensembles including the Nouveau Classical Project, Gamelan Dharma Swara, and the Mexican big band group Banda de los Muertos with Chris Speed and Oscar Noriega. Mara has also lived in the Costa Rican jungle studying white-faced capuchin monkeys.
maramayermusic.com/Mara_Mayer_Music/Music.html

Peter Principle
Best known for his 35 year association with the pan-national multi-disciplined performance music group Tuxedomoon (extensively described in the 2008 book "Music For Vagabonds" by Isabelle Corbisier), he has composed, played on, recorded or produced a myriad of published works within a wide spectrum of alternative music fields. Some of this work has been featured in productions by Maurice Bejart and films by Wim Wenders, and in the movie "Downtown 81". Releasing a number of critically acclaimed solo albums, he has performed in venues across the spectrum from the Pompidou Centre in Paris to the Issue Project Room in Brooklyn, most recently in Berne, Switzerland. He was a guest of the Futureplaces festival in Porto Portugal Oct. 2011 where he organized a performance involving 12 musicians and a phalanx of hi powered car sound systems. In NYC he has collaborated with Dok Gregory mostly on ZGT since 2007, going twice to Russia, once with Zemi17 in support of the Gamelatron.

Dok Gregory (Doktor23)
Dok has been composing, performing and recording experimental/electronic music since 1983. His current projects include Zero Gravity Thinkers (NYC) with Peter Principle/Zemi 17, Silence Corporation (NYC/SPb, Russia) with Pavel Mikheev/Alexei Pliousnine/VJ Yuri Elik, and Future Dream Transmissions (NYC) with Masha Gitin. He has been a member of seminal NYC based audio visual group Amoeba Technology since 1997, toured and performed in festivals throughout the United States, Europe, Russia and South America and had recorded works released in most of the same. Doks' collaborative audio-visual works have been featured in programs at the Forum Des Images in Paris, Basel Art Fair in Switzerland, The Kitchen and Lincoln Center in NYC. In 2007 he began work on the ISRS system (a shortwave radio synthesizer) and continues to research, develop and deploy the technology. Dok has also toured and collaborated extensively as a member of Incidence Transmission Network, Psychic TV, Akashic Currency Bureau, Trance Pop Loops and the Ransom Corp. He is and has been based in Brooklyn, N.Y. for the past 20 years, and is director of the 23 Windows Arts Collective in Bushwick. zgt.me

Jeremy D. Slater is a multi-disciplinary artist working in the areas of sound, video, computer art, performance, and installation. Born in Reading, England and a graduate of both SUNY College at Buffalo and School of Visual Arts with an MFA in Computer Art. Performances include sound and live performed video that is ambient and sometimes interactive/reactive Video work also includes single and multiple channel videos for screening and installations with sound and ephemeral sculpture. He is currently curator of a sound and video performances at Front Room Gallery. He has curated numerous performance events and gallery shows in New York including A Sound Show at Front Room Gallery, sound/video performances series kere.u and FLOW, Sun Khronos at Millennium Film Workshop, and Video as an Instrument. at The Tank and Supreme Trading Gallery. Jeremy Slater was one of the 1999 recipients of the Computer Art Fellowship from New York Foundation of the Arts (NYFA) and has attended the Experimental Television Residency, was guest musician at Watermill Center with Cave/Leimay, and was artist in residence at Seoul Art Space_Geumcheon in Seoul, South Korea. He has exhibited and performed nationally and internationally. www.jeremyslater.net  www.parenthesismusic.com