Scott Kiernan & Victoria Keddie

Jan 18 - Feb 17, 2019

Safe Gallery, 1004 Metropolitan Ave, Brooklyn, NY 11211
 

Scott Kiernan’s sound and video installations are restless within their own materiality. Often working in real-time with analog video, his work blends synthesized and found content through language games. He’s made video poems for an age of verbal erosion and painted large-scale, pre-internet clip art ads devoid of their products. Horse Tail Falls at Safe Gallery deconstructs a found photograph which shares the namesake of a Yosemite waterfall known to glow as if in flames under certain light. Through his work, found images and phrases find new life, free from their former meaning and reaching a shaky hand out to touch back through the machine.

Kiernan founded and co-directed Louis V.E.S.P, an artist-run gallery and performance space in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and is the director of Various/Artists, a publishing imprint for handmade records and videotapes by artists working across diverse media. He’s exhibited and performed internationally at venues including the New Museum, Whitney Museum of American Art, Harvard Art Museums, P.S.122, Ballroom Marfa, and the Center for International Contemporary Art in Rome, among others.

Victoria Keddie combines a practice in sound, moving image, and performance to understand the after-life of the broadcasted signal and its ongoing decay. The language she embeds into her systems moves swiftly, evolving around their own inner logic. They fuse audio dissonance with whirlpools of color and electronic light. Her recent work, Object Afterlife, develops a language for outer space debris—chunks of rocket, flakes of paint— and their afterlife as they float on through Earth’s Lower Orbit. Previous works such as 54 days of blank sun in July (through the lens of Ben Riley’s snare) and then pits solar eclipse imagery against a rapid snare drum.

Amongst the work she’ll show at Safe Gallery, three-channel video Test Patterns is an in-studio journey through the cathode ray tube. In this work, Keddie acts as a medium between sound and image in their sensitive efforts to communicate with each other.

unkNOW is an international live stream festival based in Oslo. As a symptom of digital culture, streaming is the emphasis which defines relations between spatial and temporal distances. While the rapid-fire absorption of media overtaking our experience of the physical world, unkNOW creates a space to explore the complexities of internet culture and how we connect through the digital intimacy of performance and visual art. 

The festival brings together works from Beijing-, London-, NYC- and Oslo-based performance and media artists, incorporating broadcasts and television taping events, live stream and physical performances, media art and music, which explore power structures of hyperconnected society, televisual language, surveillance and the relationship between the human and a machine. In addition to a physical event at Akademirommet, Kunstneres Hus in Oslo, the works are documented and presented as an online exhibition here at UNKNOW, 10.12.18 → 13.01.19. 

Participants 
Karen Nikgol (NOR)  E.S.P. TV (USA) Josse Thuresson & Karin Keisu (SWE) Funa Ye & Baio (CHN)Yoke Collective (UK) Lesia Vasylchenko (UKR) Magnus Andreas Hagen Olsen (NOR)

“If we could only catch up with the wave of information… we would, at last, be in the now… to digest and comprehend [its] totality would amount to having reality on tap as if from a fantastic media control room capable of monitoring everything, everywhere, all at the same time.” - Douglas Rushkoff, Present Shock

unkNOW is an international live stream festival based in Oslo. As a symptom of digital culture, streaming is the emphasis which defines relations between spatial and temporal distances. While the rapid-fire absorption of media overtaking our experience of the physical world, unkNOW creates a space to explore the complexities of internet culture and how we connect through the digital intimacy of performance and visual art.

On December 7, unkNOW will bring together works from Beijing-, London-, NYC- and Oslo based performance and media artists, incorporating broadcasts and television taping events, live stream and physical performances, media art and music, which explore power structures of hyper-connected society, televisual language, surveillance and the relationship between the human and a machine.

UNKNOW is an online environment for interdisciplinary exchange between young artists, guest curators and academics. It is an open-format space for displaying works and research-based projects dedicated to digital culture, philosophy, and media. In addition to the physical event, the works will be documented and presented as an online exhibition December 10 – January 13 at unknow.online.

The event on facebook

In the late 1960s, visual artists experimenting with the new medium of video saw the potential of public access television to act as an open and uncensored platform for the creation and dissemination of their work. This exhibition will present both key and lesser-known figures who worked in the public-access arena, as well as contemporary artists experimenting with the democratic potential of new media platforms on the Internet. BRIC’s own public access channels will be continuously aired in the gallery space, and a stage in the center of the gallery will act as a set for the production of new programming by BRIC’s community producers.

Historic and recent programming by: Collaborative Projects, Jaime Davidovich, Glenn O’Brien, Nam June Paik, Paper Tiger TV, and Tony Ramos. Contemporary artist projects by: Natalie Bookchin, E.S.P. TV, Jayson Musson, Jon Rubin, and URe:AD Press (Shani Peters and Sharita Towne).

The exhibition will host a live to tape event with E.S.P. TV on April 15th inside gallery exhibition space. The event will be broadcast on Bric Media. Full program TBA

Curated by Jenny Gerow, Assistant Curator of Contemporary Art

More information here: http://www.bricartsmedia.org/art-exhibitions/public-accessopen-networks. OPENING RECEPTION: March 22, 2017 | 7-9PM

E.S.P. TV: WORK

Pioneer Works | 159 Pioneer Street | Brooklyn, NY 11231
Hours: Wednesday – Sunday from 12:00 p.m. – 6:00 p.m.
www.pioneerworks.org

Pioneer Works is pleased to present WORK, E.S.P. TV’s first institutional solo exhibition in the United States. Directed by Victoria Keddie and Scott Kiernan, E.S.P. TV is best known for their live television tapings that feature experimental broadcast collaborations with underground poets, musicians, and artists via their mobile television studio.

For WORK, E.S.P. TV makes Pioneer Works’ office staff and environment the subject of a six-week performative, televisual installation by relocating the organization’s second-floor, open-plan office to the first-floor’s main exhibition space. Surrounded by a de-centralized control room, the office doubles as both a dynamic sculptural set — painted partly in chroma blue and featuring movable walls, among other features — and the actual site for the staff’s five-day workweek. The staff’s “daily grind” will be mixed live, on-site, with custom video effects and commercial interruptions. Far from peddling in the sensational tropes of reality TV, WORK instead turns banal, day-to-day office routines and patterns — the movement of a chair, a co-worker getting coffee — into the improbable, playful content of a serial program to be broadcast weekly on the Manhattan Neighborhood Network. E.S.P. TV worked closely with curator David Everitt Howe to envision this social experiment and exhibition, which responds to the building’s unique environment and tight-knit, collective office culture.

Work was curated by David Everitt Howe, Curator/Editor at Pioneer Works.

Audio tour here: http://esptour.org/

MEDIA INQUIRIES:  Becky Elmquist I becky@pioneerworks.org I 917.971.9401

E.S.P. TV are participants of this years Queens International. Special Live Taping event, Becoming New Objects, includes  performances by Logan Takahashi and Human Pitch Freeform Ensemble, with additional performances by Trouble, and Patrick Higgins. More information here.

E.S.P. TV has a video installation on show throughout QI exhibition. 

Swiss Institute/Contemporary Art, 18 Wooster St. NY NY 10013

With Douglas Davis, Nick Hallett, Lary 7, Sara Ludy, Brock Monroe, Leyna Marika Papach, “Clouds and Crowds” directed by Alexander Waterman, Damon Zucconi.

You Don’t Say Much, Do You?, an installation for a two-channel video and teleprompter, will be on view to visitors in the hours leading up to the live event. As E.S.P. TV goes “on air” this piece will transform into the set of the night’s performance.

A program containing selections from E.S.P. TV’s nearly 100-episode archive will also be on view in the downstairs screening room.

E.S.P. TV  are operating the experimental video lab out of Pioneer Works as part of their Art and Science Residencies. The (lab) studio runs from February thru July 2016. More information here.