6th Annual Transmodern Festival - Live.Art.Action

Adam Good is a writer and performance lecturer from Washington, DC. Through diagrams, lectures, and prototypes, he explores the Realm of All Relations (the ROAR), quantum semantics, object-oriented thought, and radical recombinance. He thinks about thinking, a lot. Some of his lectures are available here: http://www.errationality.com/?page_id=6. He has collaborated with Kate Porter on “I Know Where We Are: An Interface in Three Movements” (http://tinyurl.com/ahxsun). He posts his diagrams here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/asgood/. He is a member of the research collective WE ARE SCIENCE! with Jon Lee and other humans. He sends a shout out to post-it notes.

Alex Worthington is a Baltimore based artist who resides in Waverly in a big drafty house with other women as crazy as herself. Alex considers Baltimore her hometown but grew up in Tennessee. Alex is a self-taught artist who began focusing on illustration but now mainly focuses on sculptural installations. Alex aims to create a vernacular that combines the eerie magic of the enclaves she encountered throughout the foothills of the Smokey Mountains with the disparate enchantment and attitude of Baltimore to express a modern tale that meditates on issues of race, class and gender through the symbolism of familiar relics. She is currently obsessed with the formation of sugar crystals known as rock candy.

ALTERED STATES, Curated by Jamillah James for Frontier Projects

Sunday April 5th, 2009
LOF/T Load of Fun Theatre
120 W. North Avenue
Directions
Tickets: $5
Doors Open: 8 pm, Performances begin at 9 pm

Live Performances by Lexie Mountain Boys, Soft Circle (ex-Black Dice/Lightning Bolt), Blues Control (Siltbreeze Records, Brooklyn), Ra Khuit Noor, and New Jedi Order.

Altered States examines the history of collective action, originating in the 1960s with communalism (made families in hippie and freak subcultures), and avant-garde performance, where elements were borrowed from traditional rituals and ceremonial spectacle. This rubric for performance and artistic practice champions a freedom from creative, economic, and social constraints, and de-emphasizes the singular, commodifiable art object as the end-all of cultural production.

The exhibition considers a renewed interest in the aesthetics and performativity of mysticism. Through idiosyncratic performance, borrowed iconography, and the creation of “invested” objects and spaces, the artists in Altered States re-contextualize alterity, or “otherness”, as a psychedelic state of being, and explore the secular, the sacred, and the creative space in between.

Artists:
Delia & Gavin (video)
EMR (Extreme Mature Respect: Math Bass & Dylan Mira) (video)
Forcefield (Matt Brinkman, Jim Drain, Leif Goldberg, Ara Peterson) (video)
Lexie Mountain Boys (performance on Sunday 4/5)
Zeljko McMullen & Severiano Martinez (video)
New Jedi Order (installation + performance)
Jimmy Joe Roche (video)
Caitlin Williams & Sarah Milinski (installation)
Erin Womack (objects + performance)

	Delia & Gavin (Delia Gonzalez & Gavin Russom: video) are multidisciplinary artists based in Berlin. Their practice encompasses video, performance, sculpture, and music.  They have been working collaboratively for the past seven years. Their work approaches the ecstatic atmosphere present in both initiation and celebration, mirroring the function of these rituals as simultaneous expressions of creative and destructive energy. A repetitive element is present both visually in meticulously sequined totems and modular Formica block sculptures, as well as in the sound produced by their electronic music synthesizers, provoking a state of trance. A minimalist aesthetic is used for its ability to generate an abstraction of reality within which many points of reference can interact. The work derives inspiration from such seemingly disparate sources as Greek tragedy, fascist architecture, Latin American mythology, 70’s horror films, and disco culture and it is particularly focused on historical moments of decadence and extremes. Their work has been presented at PS1 The Center for Contemporary Art (Long Island City, NY), Daniel Reich Gallery (NY), Jack Hanley (San Francisco), Peres Projects (Los Angeles), Galleria Fonti (Naples, IT), among other places.  They are also well known for their musical recordings on the DFA label, and have been the cover subject of Arthur magazine.
	EMR (Extreme Mature Respect: video) is a new collaborative entity, formed between interdisciplinary San Francisco-based artists Dylan Mira and Math Bass (formerly of the performance duo Marriage). They have previously collaborated on the Pilot TV Chicago convergence, and have shown individually at Mix NYC, Documenta 12, and in collaboration with LTTR, the celebrated colloborative queer feminist publication. Most recently, EMR’s work has been featured in Channeling: An Invocation of Spectral Bodies & Queer Spirits, a film and video exhibition curated by Latham Zearfoss and Ethan White, which has been screened internationally.
	Forcefield (video) were an art collective and band closely associated with Fort Thunder, an event space in Providence, Rhode Island between 1995 and 2001. Known for performing in colorful full-body knit-wear of their own design, Forcefield rarely performed outside of Rhode Island, but did one US tour with their Fort Thunder roommates Lightning Bolt. Members included Meerk Puffy (Matt Brinkman), Gorgon Radeo (Jim Drain), Patootie Lobe (Ara Peterson), and Le Geef (Leif Goldberg). The group become more widely recognized after being included in the 2002 Whitney Biennial, but dissolved shortly afterwards.  Third Annual Roggaboggas, the soundtrack accompanying their Biennial installation, was released as a CD by Load Records in 2003. Later that year, Bulb Records put out the posthumous Lord of the Ring Modulators. The work of Forcefield and other Fort Thunder-related artists has been chronicled in Artforum, the New York Times, and in the exhibition, Wunderground: Providence 1995 to the Present at the Rhode Island School of Design. Since its demise, members of Forcefield have exhibited internationally and have been published widely in a variety of projects.
	Zeljko McMullen & Severiano Martinez (video) have been collaborating for years, chiefly on projects related to their recording label Shinkoyo (also home to Baltimoreans Peter Blasser and Carson Garhardt). McMullen lives and works in Brooklyn, New York at the experimental performance and art space he founded, Paris London West Nile. Martinez is a published writer and musician based in New York. In July 2008, West Nile was the subject of an exhibition at D’Amelio Terras gallery in Manhattan, in which a portion of The Fool’s Journey was featured.
	Lexie Mountain Boys (performance): a many-limbed, many-voiced beast that lives in Baltimore. Founded in 2005 by Lexie Macchi, LMB have managed to escape all categorizing and most contextualizing. Relying primarily on their bodies as instruments, they recall 70s sisterfied female performance art met with the raucous collectivist spirit of the aughts, filed under experimental. They wail, stomp, whistle, giggle, clap, intone, incant, and always surprise. Their recordings and live performances have garnered critical acclaim in national music press. They have performed nationally and will embark on their first European tour in April. Shortly before their performance for Altered States, they will have their first institutional appearance, hosted by the New Museum in New York City.
	The New Jedi Order (installation + performance) is a radical open source copyleft new media conglomerate run out of Baltimore USA. As hybrid defenders of anarchic media all output from the conglomerate refuses any form of intellectual property ownership and views such concepts as counterproductive and delusional mentalities instilled in the general public by the systems that be. The collective aims to create new relevant dialog out of preexisting symbols. Work is broadcast as a means of channeling the decentralized forces of the information age toward the general erosion of outdated and fascist institutions. Work by the collective is unbiased in venue and form. Varying from performing at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and Baltimore Contemporary Museum to performing, screening, and working anonymously in underground, DIY, cyber and public spaces. Borrowing elements from many different models the audio, video, and pictorial output of the NJO is often designed for and distributed over the internet, recycled analog tapes, photocopy zines and Compact Discs.
	Jimmy Joe Roche (video) is a Baltimore-based visual artist, filmmaker, and member of the Wham City collective. Roche’s work has been screened in venues and museums all over the U.S. and Canada, including the Corcoran Museum of Art, the Walters Art Museum, Anthology Film Archives, New York Underground Film Festival, Yale College, the Great American Music Hall, and San Francisco International Animation festival. His recent collaboration, “Ultimate Reality”, with musician Dan Deacon has gained national press attention. Recently, Roche’s short film “Baltimore Shopping Network” was featured on the New Museum’s website Rhizome, and his music video for Deacon’s “Crystal Cat” was featured on the front page of YouTube, garnering over half a million hits. In June 2008, Roche had his first solo exhibition, Totems, at New York’s R.A.R.E Gallery.
	Caitlin Williams & Sarah Milinski (installation) Caitlin was born and raised in or around Virginia Beach, VA. She is a fibers major at Maryland Institute College of Art.  Sarah was born in Oxfordshire, U.K., she is a video teacher. Sarah heard of Caitlin and was curious. Many years later, pretty much the stars aligned and art work was made. Their abiding interests are cats, Shakers, succulents, hand made ropes, woven imagery, wycinanki, lavender incense and making the world’s largest friendship bracelet together. They hope to meet you at Transmodern–otherwise, see you in the future. Keep it friendly.
	Erin Womack (objects + performance) is an artist working in print media, performance and film. Her narratives tell of a primeval reality where humanoids are left to wander vacant forests and deserts. She has recently exhibited at Space 1026 in Philadelphia and Mountain Fold Gallery in New York City. She has self-published a number of small books independently and with the Baltimore-based group Closed Caption Comics. For Altered States she will be performing with Ravi Binning as Ra Khuit Noor: “Together, they are ambassadors of new Egypt, creating charred feedback hymnals as an offering to the ancient ones.”

*Special thanks to Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), New York for the Forcefield videos and Delia Gonzalez, Gavin Russom, and DFA Records for the Delia & Gavin video.

Ami Dang is a South-Asian American musician and multimedia artist born and raised in Glen Arm, Maryland. Her work shifts between electronic and acoustic music, installation, movement, video, and various intermedia forms.  Currently, she is focused on solo performance that combines experimental music notions with North Indian classical sentiments to create a unique one-woman show. Having studied North Indian classical vocals and sitar for over ten years in the United States and Delhi, India, she conjures a 21st century spell of sounds further influenced by ambient, noise, and minimal musics.  In 2005, she became a disciple (for sitar) of Dr. Anupam Mahajan of the Senia Ghurana.  A year later she graduated from Oberlin College Conservatory of Music with a bachelor’s degree in technology in music and related arts.

In 2005 and 2006, she completed two multimedia performance productions.  She directed, composed, and choreographed Unee Sau Churaasee, a one-act performance for video installation, music, and six dancers about the 1984 anti-Sikh riots of Delhi, India. She also created a performance about consumption in contemporary society entitled Reception, a show for viewer-interactive installation using MIDI sensors and five music video shorts.  Last year, shereleased a tour-only EP Because You Rained On Me, and she is currently working on a full-length album.

Ami is often thinking about Sikh spirituality and performance, how children become adults, the sounds of the body, hair, perceptions of the self and the other, translation of information, the public vs. the private, brown identities, beauty, otherness, and good beats.

The AVWC is an A/V “lounge” curated by Baltimore-based group Snacks.  The The lounge will provide continuous sound and video enjoyment for the Transmodern festivalgoers.

The lounge will be located on the 3rd Floor/Whole Gallery and will be open on Friday and Saturday evenings. 

Participating artists include: (subject to change)

Kristen Anchor (Baltimore)
Mitchell Brown (Los Angeles)
Chris Cooper (Mass.)
Drew Daniel (Baltimore)
Deven Green (Los Angeles)
ID M THeftable (Maine)
Hans Grusel’s KrankenKabinet (San Francisco)
Leprechaun Catering (Baltimore)
Melissa Moore (Baltimore)
People like Us (UK)
Martin Schmidt (Baltimore)
Swinging Chandeliers (Los Angeles)
Tarantism (San Francisco)
Karen Yasinsky + Snacks (Baltimore)
C. Spencer Yeh (Cincinnati) 

David Moré currently works in Chicago, Illinois. His work is often a result of experiments with ordinary objects to produce sound. The end result of these experiments, ideally, exposes the listener to subtle sonic events occuring all around them.

Edward Knapp creates works in fiber, flame, glass, bone, paper, and pigment, together with harvested and found materials. His pieces are grounded in traditional forms and techniques, manifesting Vision in co-creation with Spirit. He has over 15 years of experience in the divinatory arts.

From the ultra-feminine to the nadir masculino, artist Fred Van Dyk has tried to reach both ends of the spectrum. Hair-centric, his work tends towards fibrous frictional static-producing interactions and a search for a metaphysical ground. By day he is suffering from this very full and human dominated world, and when on the other side, in the night world, he finds a place without nature, without the rest of us, “I fear and relish the absence, space, and sense of loss. In this space there is a need and into this need I am pulled wide awake.” His performance and performance residue is prized for sensitivity, sensuousity, and sensuality.

So if one were to unravel a bunch, and I mean, A WHOLE LOT of thrifted afghans, one would get a sizable amount of yarn to wind around two 3-foot, doughnut-holed cardboard discs.  Depending on when one assessed one’s progress, the cardboard form’s colors would vary quite a bit (unless somehow one was able to find all the same color blanket).  One could wedge their fingers into the strands of yarn to get a peek of what’s within, but for the most part, layers and layers of whoknowswhatcolor would be buried inside.  Then, if in front of an audience one were to cut along the outer edge of the yarn-filled form, all the colors would spill out, no apologies.  Once the center has been tied, and the doughnuts have been chewed out by scissors, a ridiculous 3-foot pom-pom is left full-exposure on the stage.  This may or may not literally happen when one shares one’s words, but it for damn sure happens figuratively.

Hermonie is an Epistemological Liberal (sometimes things just happen. sometimes things just don’t happen). She is an Aries, born on the cusp of Pisces, in the year of the Ox. Her work is replete with the Specific, “I want to be here,” and she thrives on the Obvious, “I want you to be here with me.”

John Eaton: Longtime fixture in Baltimore Art & Music scene. Member of the time-bending ensemble Geodesic Gnome; local DJ; participant in High Zero and Transmodern Festival; first runner-up Dancing with the Stars 2007; and a big ol’ queer to boot.

Julia Oldham lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. Her recent exhibitions include solo shows at The Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, IL; The University of Virginia in Charlottesville, VA; Art in General in New York, NY; and Macalester College in St. Paul, MN. Her work has been supported by the City of Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs; Artadia, the Fund for Art and Dialogue; and Art in General in New York.

Julia was born in Frederick, Maryland in 1979 and grew up in both Maryland and New Hampshire. She received a Bachelor of Arts in Art History at St. Mary’s College of Maryland in 2001, and a Master of Fine Arts at the University of Chicago in 2005.

Kelley Bell is an animator, graphic designer, and educator who is often willing to make mistakes and other interesting experiments. The animation shown on Friday evening at the H&H Building, “Garden of Earthly Delights” brings new life to the work of
Hieronymus Bosch, and our notions of good, evil, and the places we live in.

  Pedestrian Service Express

   On Sunday, Kelley Bell presents the Pedestrian Service Express, a new convenient way to navigate the artists and  events at Pedestrian Service Exquisite. It’s a new form of mass transit that has absolutely no negative impact on the  environment, and provides several different routes and lines to experience the day at your own pace. Also includes transfer points to the Light Rail and Kathryn Williamson’s specialized light rail tour. Ongoing for the whole Sunday festival!

Lauren Bender: 5′0″, approx. 110#, Hampden, across from the cemetery.

BIO: (b.1981) Liz Meredith is a violist, improviser, and composer originally from Baltimore, Maryland. Her music is improvisatory in nature, and frequently moves towards the outer limits of musical genres, being influenced by rock, electronic, and contemporary classical music.

Liz has collaborated with an assortment of individuals, including songwriters, rock bands, electronic musicians, improvisers, and composers. She has composed concert music for The Esterhazy String Quartet, The Opabinia Quartet, and has created electronic and electro-acoustic fixed media works as well.

www.lizmeredith.com
www.myspace.com/lizmeredith

[coming soon]

“Lurch and Holler” is E. Liz Downing and Michael Willis.

Trying to save the world every weekend morning, they conjure healing vibrations by harmonizing with household appliances. They accompany these vibrations with banjo, guitar, and neighborhood sounds like trash trucks, birds, helicopters and such. Finally, “Lurch and Holler” sing, coo and growl words into the poultice which have lately been inspired by the Odyssey, Flannery O’Connor and Gertrude Stein. The resulting medicine is Appalachian Techno Psychedelia and not so far from “Lurch and Holler’s” origin, the Mystic Hillbillie Opera of the late trio, “Lambs Eat Ivy”.

Melissa Webb is saturated colors and intricate textures and light and movement and wind and gravity today!

Her favorite color is green.

She enjoys long walks in dense forests, real fake things, ruffles, and fluttering tendrils.

Turn-ons and turn-offs: She tends to fancy open spaces and unassuming places, and wants to find ways to break free from the limitations of white gallery walls, pedestals, and stages.

In her spare time she likes to collaborate with good friends, creating eye-catching public spectacles, alternate realities, and thought-provoking, interactive experiences for human beings.

http://www.bakerartistawards.org/nomination/view/Missy

http://www.ciat-lonbarde.net/

Rebecca Nagle is a performance, new media and community artist. She grew up in Kansas. After attending Interlochen Arts Academy, she studied at Maryland Institute College of Art. She is an internationally exhibited and collected artist with works in the New Museum, NY and Ssamzie Art Warehouse, South Korea. Nagle has shown at Current Gallery, Art in General, Site Santa Fe, Artscape, and Conflux Festival. She was hailed by Baltimore City’s Paper’s senior arts editor Bret McCabe as “Baltimore’s very own life-is-art-is-life performance maven…mingling the internet and performance into a fresh and vital new thing”. Rebecca’s performative, interative and community art projects challenge people around issues of intimacy, the body, power, boundaries and efficacy. She is currently trying to make the world a more open, equitable and creative place through community organizing and radical performance art. To follow her efforts go to www.rebeccanagle.com.

Samuel Burt is mainly a composer of chamber and electroacoustic music as well as an experimental sound manipulator of reed instruments and computer synthesis. His current mission is to produce more dialog between the expansive, mature, experimental scene in Baltimore and musicians trained in the traditional western discipline. He believes that an intuitive music philosophy would make better performers at the conservatory, and more formalistic and rehearsed ideas could improve the music of the experimental community. His music reflects these values with a moderated approach that sometime explores experimental forms through traditional media (see Parametric Transmutations) and other times explores challenging concepts through new methods of conveyance (see Unwound). Burt teaches at the Baltimore School for the Arts, is an organizing member of the High Zero Foundation, helped found the After Now new chamber music series, and performs regularly with bands Death in the Maze and Geodesic Gnome.

Born and raised in the western United States, Rose Burt moved to the east coast in 2000 when her strong interest in music led her to pursue a degree in classical saxophone performance at the Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore.  At Peabody, she  became increasingly involved with the Jazz and Computer Music departments, and upon completion of her undergraduate degree, Rose enrolled in the Masters program in Computer Music.  Encouraged by several faculty members and fellow students to explore improvisation further, she became involved with experimental music at the Red Room, and was invited to join the Red Room collective and High Zero Foundation in the spring of 2005.  As a member of the collective she helps book and run an experimental concert series at the Red Room in Baltimore and the annual High Zero Festival. of experimental improvised music.   Currently she is curating a composed chamber music series at Carriage House called Aesthetic Research Series; she performs with Death in the Maze, the Baltimore Afrobeat Society, Second Nature and in the After Now series.

Sarada Conaway is an artist and independent curator working in Baltimore MD. Her work focuses on removing boundaries between everyday life and art. Her current body of work is a large-scale collaboration with residents of standard apartment buildings. Ms. Conaway received her BFA from the Tyler College of Art and is recent graduate of the University of Maryland MFA program.

Jackie Milad is an artist who works with drawing, performance art and installation, and often creates projects that brings these disciplines together. Her projects explore the awkward moments shared between people. She has exhibited internationally and nationally in such places such as The Contemporary Museum in Baltimore, Gallery 32 as part of the London Biennale, Delaware Center of Contemporary Art in Wilmington, Museum of Fine Arts in Mazatlan, Mexico and Galeria de Jovenes in Culiacan, Mexico. In 2005 she earned her MFA from Towson University, and in 2000 she received her BFA from Tufts University and the School of Museum of Fine Arts. In 1998, Ms. Milad studied painting at the Studio Arts Center International in Florence Italy. She is currently Program Coordinator for the Union Gallery at University of Maryland, College Park.

Make-Over
Sarada Conaway and Jackie Milad will offer free makeovers to self selected volunteers. Participants will receive a before, in-between and after photograph. Milad’s in-between makeovers will resemble her current series of portrait drawings; awkward, empathetic and humorous. Conaway’s makeovers create an altered appearance, and an unusual social interaction.

Sarah Jablecki earned her B.F.A. from Rhode Island School of Design in 2004 and her M.F.A. from Maryland Institute of Art in 2008. Her work has appeared in in Selected, Photographers Forum, Photo District News, and AI - AP with Nan Goldin, Terry Richardson, and Sofia Copolla. Her award winning work has been exhibited across the Mid-Atlantic and North East, granted the Marty Forscher Fellowship Fund for “recognition of humanitarian efforts, remarkable storytelling ability, and creativity” as well as the Robert Mapplethorpe Award, and the Roberta Polevoy Award of the Baltimore Community Foundation. She currently resides in Baltimore and continues to create provocative fiber work, photography, and installations dealing with issues of intimacy, family, sexuality, and culture.

Sarah Magida is a robot who was raised in Baltimore City. She enjoys long walks in nature, candel light diners and electric charges. She comes on a little strong at first but she may also have the best of intentions or not. She is a late seventies, early eighties model A-HoT1.

Created in the spring of 2008, Services United is a collaborative group that creates social service based artworks that seek to generate community engagement and dialog. From volunteerism to sustainable practices, SU is interested in exploring the concept of interaction and services as an art form. Recent Projects include Baltimore City Seed Bomb Map, Emergency Preparedness Gardens, inviting the public to complete survey’s about the service industry, and a series of performances exploring volunteerism.

Members: Jill Fannon, Marian April Glebes, Jaimes Mayhew, Kathryn Williamson, & Shannon Young.

www.servicesunited.net

Maps for Ascending

Services United will create an electric scavenger hunt in Gallery Four using maps and clues that communicate energy consumption patterns.

Shana Palmer was implanted into the valley’s surrounding the Superstition Mountains.

She is an unapologetic sensualist with a taste for surrealist animal paintings.

With the guidance of the woodland deer spirits she creates hauntingly beautiful music under the guise of Child Bride.

She would like to have you for dinner.

Nick Becker spends most of his days writing Artist Bios for Artists such as Nick Becker. Nick Becker is writing an Artist Bio for Nick Becker right now. Nick Becker spends the rest of his time learning how to make medicine from native plants and storing deer meat in preparation for 2012. Nick Becker makes a living as a psychedelic guinea pig at Johns Hopkins University. Nick Becker is not separate from you or I. Nick Becker is that there is no Nick Becker.

Smelling Salt Amusements is Heather Romney and Peter Redgrave. They are educators by trade and entertainers by whim. Please visit smellingsaltamusements.org for more information.

From scratch from scratch from scratch. Is it better to use my bio all set to go? Is this a good process? I am an artist who is a performance artist/playwrite. I’ve written and toured with many short and long plays. The play I am working on now has performance art in it; it actually contains performance art! Such questions resonate through my work - when is the best time for performers to burst into song? When is sadness strong and evocative, and when does it droop the energy? How is exuberance funny and deep? Why is the structure of every day so incredibly weird?

You can catch a glimpse of some work I’ve done on www.zerotv.com. Just type my name in the search box in the lower left hand corner. The Tingle Showcase was a show I put on collaboratively at Darling Hall, a theater we started where I lived for 5 years in Milwaukee. I’ve also made several films and videos.

Tiffany DeFoe is a saxophonist and stone-age giantess with a love for all kinds of music and a willingness to play in virtually any situation, which has occasionally gotten her into trouble. Luckily, it has also gotten her into the Stolen Heart Cabaret, the 2008 Whitney Biennial Neighborhood Public Radio exhibit, the Black Hole Rock Club (only chainlink stage fence in Baltimore!), the Knitting Factory, the Creative Alliance, CBGB, Caribbean Paradise soul food restaurant on Charles, various festivals, and all kinds of warehouse parties where she might have felt a bit awkward if she weren’t onstage. Current projects include a band called Gunwife Gone, a recording project with a hiphop producer called Dolphin, a community arts and activism center called 2640, and a collectively owned and operated bookstore called Red Emma’s.