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Am pleased to announce an exhibition of my work, OKAY Hermetic, at River Gallery. River Gallery is an art gallery located on the Delaware River between Warren County NJ and Northampton County PA.
This is the fourth show for the gallery. Previous exhibitors were Joel Cook, Andrej Ujhazy, and Stephane Kersten.
As promised, I am posting some post-show documentation of St Celfer's performance at ICOSA Collective, Austin, TX, on December 12, 2020. The images came from the gallery and other sources. First, a phone shot (rotated to normal orientation) depicting a laptop and large screen monitor streaming the video of the St Celfer/Tom Moody release eleven tracks, a compilation which includes St Celfer's song "March of the Covids" (https://youtu.be/e_zaeQ-SpzQ):
Next, a couple of pics from the gallery showing the scale and space of the artwork. There were two viewing stations streaming the video:
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And last, "social media reactions" including a blurry close-up and sound excerpt from the video:
St Celfer and Tom Moody "eleven tracks" Video - excerpt from Tom Moody on Vimeo.
The video as it appeared playing on a device:
St Celfer and Tom Moody “eleven tracks” Video - excerpt 2 from Tom Moody on Vimeo.
And the video playing in the gallery:
St Celfer and Tom Moody "eleven tracks" Video - Installation from Tom Moody on Vimeo.
[Note: embedded players -- which I basically hate -- are replaced with links when they move off the blog front page]
Screenshot from the gallery's Instagram promotion (click or tap for more legible, full-size text):
Text of announcement (with bios):
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
St Celfer Performance at ICOSA Collective, December 12, 2020
Austin, TX
St Celfer’s musical work “March of the Covids” will be performed at the ICOSA space in an unusual way -- as an abstract, encoded YouTube video. The song made its original appearance at the Casagaleria art space in São Paulo, Brazil as a 16 channel audio composition “distributed” in the gallery through directional speakers. At ICOSA the work will be presented virtually in the form of video projections, in a new, collaborative incarnation. “Covids” will be “played” as one of a suite of recent compositions by St Celfer, who is currently based in Seattle, and his long-time collaborator Tom Moody, a New York artist and musician.
Eleven tracks by the two artists have been converted to video using Pitahaya, a software program created by John Romero. Pitahaya turns the audio (which can still be heard) into a stream of random pixels resembling TV snow and QR codes. Uploaded to YouTube, the 35-minute video will be played by the gallery and may be watched like a Stan Brakhage-like abstraction, with fluctuating, chaotic correspondences between picture and sound. The video has embedded content but there is nothing subliminal or mystical about it: instead, Pitahaya has been used to convert a CD-quality version of the eleven songs, which can be downloaded and decoded as explained at http://jollo.org/LNT/doc/pitahaya/.
The audiovisual performance runs from 3-6 PM Central on December 12, 2020.
Biographical information
St Celfer has drawings (http://stcelfer.blogspot.com/) that have been recently acquired by the Museum of Contemporary Art, São Paulo and in November 2020, released “Suites #1-9” (https://stcelfer.bandcamp.com/album/suites-1-9). He has exhibited and performed primarily in New York as John Parker (http://www.eyekhan.com/index1.html) among other aliases.
Tom Moody is a New York-based artist (https://tommoody.us) and musician (https://tommoody.bandcamp.com/). Most recently his work was seen in the exhibition "PAUSE (prelude)" at Künstlerverbund im Haus der Kunst, Munich, Germany.
John Romero is an artist and programmer who was a member of the Computers Club collective (under the name Rene Abythe) and was profiled on Rhizome.org at https://rhizome.org/editorial/2011/dec/08/artist-profile-rene-abythe/. His website is at http://jollo.org/LNT/home/fanfare/.
December 4 - I'll be posting a conversation with John Parker, who I've collaborated with in art and music since 2004. We did an interview that year and decided to have a 16 year follow-up to discuss "where we are at" at the present moment in our work and thinking, and how we got there.
December 12 - The ICOSA Collective in Austin, TX, chose a musical work of Parker's for a group exhibit called Transmissions. The work appears under his St Celfer alias and relates to a project he did in São Paulo called The Space Between Points [see also]. For the Austin show he'll be debuting a joint project of ours called eleven tracks, a mixtape of sorts where I picked five tracks of his (including the one selected by ICOSA) and he picked six tracks of mine (because mine are shorter) and we discuss them. The mixtape will be "shown" on YouTube and physically projected in the space. The upload to YT will include bonus content that's been added using John Romero's Pitahaya program.
December 13 - eleven tracks, a musical LP by St Celfer and Tom Moody, launches on Bandcamp.
