Join us Friday, April 12th for Williamsburg's 2nd Friday Event at the Front Room. We will be presenting performances by: Noveller, Seyhan Musa and Jeremy Slater, in conjunction with our current exhibition: "A Fine Line" (Rob de Oude, Rodger Stevens and Rosa Valado.)
Noveller is the solo electric guitar project of Brooklyn-based composer and filmmaker Sarah Lipstate. Handling the guitar as her muse, Lipstate summons a sonic palette so rich as to challenge the listener to conceive of how it’s housed in a s...ingle instrument manipulated by a solitary performer. Her one-woman guitar soundscapes have captured the attention of NPR, The Village Voice, Time Out New York, and The Wall Street Journal. Lipstate has collaborated with several renowned musicians, including live improvised duo performances with Carla Bozulich (Evangelista, The Geraldine Fibbers), David Wm. Sims (the Jesus Lizard, Scratch Acid), and Lee Ranaldo (Sonic Youth). She has previously performed as a member of Cold Cave, Parts & Labor, and One Umbrella. Lipstate has also participated in Rhys Chatham’s Guitar Army, Ben Frost’s “Music for 6 Guitars” Ensemble, and Glenn Branca’s 100 guitar ensemble. http://
Seyhan Musaoglu is a multi-media artist whose work spans the fields of live performance, sound art, film and video, and 2-D media. Drawing inspiration from diverse sources ranging from science fiction imagery, to fashion, to modern dance choreography, her work investigates the gap between sound production and music composition, contemporary feminist theory, and the history of avant-garde filmmaking. She has been performing widely with collaborations celebrated internationally in genres of sound and experimental noise. She is also an innovative independent curator, and is the founder of the sound, new media&peformance festival {SØNiK}Fest. Seyhan holds an MFA from Parsons the New School for Design. Some of the venues her work has been presented at are: The Kitchen (NYC), New York Studio Gallery (NYC), Lit Lounge (NYC), Curta 8 Film Festival (Brazil), and Istanbul's famed venue, Babylon. To see some of her work:http://
Jeremy D. Slater is a sound artist essentially, but also works with video and sound in performance and installation settings. Performances include sound and live performed video that is ambient and sometimes reactive. Video work also includes single and multiple channel videos for screening and installations with sound and ephemeral sculpture. Jeremy 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 artist in residence at Seoul Art Space in Geumcheon in Seoul, South Korea. He has exhibited and performed nationally and internationally. http://
A FINE LINE CURRENTLY ON VIEW:
The Front Room is proud to present new works by Rob de Oude, Rodger Stevens and Rosa Valado. This exhibition explores the concept of layering and repetition as a means of achieving a unified whole while exploring the sum of its parts. Simple elements weave together to create tapestries of grand design, with limitless functions available to each individual part. Through repetition and meticulous placement, base materials like copper wire and masking tape take on a greater form, creating visual stability while inviting close visual scrutiny. Crisscrossing lines, concentric circles, and repeating forms become their own miniature works, elemental to the final form yet definitive in their own right.
Each of the artists in the exhibition use the texture of overlapping linear forms to create a much larger whole. Rob de Oude makes straight lines bend using a complicated and overlapping grid, while Rodger Stevens bent linear sculptural works bring two dimensional linear forms to life in his overwhelming room-sized installation, and Rosa Valado’s architectural table-top configuration confounds and astounds with small, yet massive-seeming wire and metal forms.
Rob de Oude’s paintings and drawings are composed of multitudes of meticulously placed and repeated lines to reveal geometric shapes and patterns. The repeated use of a single line displays the infinite possibilities of simple units towards seeking an orchestrated balance in a larger scheme. De Oude’s rigorous painting process consists of layering and weaving matrices of straight lines until, between the contrasting colors and crisscrossing patterns, grids begin to bow and warp.
In this exhibition Rodger Stevens’ installation of his linear sculptures create a space of inhabited entities, sometimes recognizable, often not, of shape and form—homages to often under appreciated things around him, they are like Egyptian hieroglyphs of our current times. Inside the space of his installation one feels absorbed and confronted, overwhelmed, by not only the objects around oneself but also by the shadows on the wall within this dense forest of sinewy metal.
Rosa Valado’s sculptures are inspired by sacred geometry, physics, and nature. Using a range of metallic light-reflecting materials, Rosa has been creating architectural forms that interact with the viewer, often containing an interior space that one can enter. Rosa, normally known for her massive public sculptures, is working on a smaller “table-top” ratio for this exhibition allowing the viewer to draw oneself inside the architectural installation, like a plan for an unworldly world’s fair unrealized.
