Friday, October 16, 2020
Systems of Vision is a two-part series featuring artists approaching sound as image-makers. These artists work within a performative framework that considers sound as a responsive system of the photographic & cinematic image. Malleable cycles of image as sound and sound as image create redefine what it means to see sound and hear an image. The second program invites artists Thomas Dexter (NYC), Rebecca Tsai & Yao-Yi Wang (Taiwan), and Maggie Wong (Chicago) who explore the tangibility of sonic texture through performance and sculpture. Curated by Kioto Aoki.
This event is a part of the Experimental Sound Studio’s The Quarantine Concerts series.
Thomas Dexter is an NYC-based artist working with the language of moving images. Dexter’s solo and collaborative projects, spanning performance, screening works, and installation, have been featured at The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum NYC, PS1/MOMA, Microscope Gallery, Experimental Intermedia, Roulette Intermedium, Issue Project Room, The New York Museum of Art and Design, Sight and Sound Festival QC, the Mononoaware Festival, The Lesley Heller Workspace, and in ESP TV among others. Dexter holds a B.A. in Psychology from Bennington College and M.F.A. from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Rebecca Tsai is a Taiwanese filmmaker and video artist based in Taiwan. Her works mainly deal with the identity of immigrants, migrants, or people who inhabit in-between two spaces. She is interested in exploring the contradictions that happen on individuals because of the complicated ideology toward their identity that is caused by global migration, and transferring those realistic conflicts into cinema elements to present those paradoxes in her documentary or narrative works. Her research includes the issue of racial barrier and social class difference. Transforming her practice in documentary filmmaking, the video installation works she makes also emphasize the barriers between people who are from different ethnics backgrounds. She received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2018.
Yao-Yi Wang graduated from the Department of Communication of National Chung Cheng University and received his MFA degree in 2019 from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, USA. He has continued to participate in the film industry since 2010 and has been involved in the film production of more than hundreds of films, including feature-length films, short films, music videos, and advertisements. Working with experimental modes in film and cinematic installation, Wang’s personal practice articulates the impact of several global historical moments during the Cold War as well as the repetitive cycles of history. He particularly focuses on the diaspora after 1949. By illustrating how human beings survived in the ideological state apparatus, namely the “homogenous and empty time” after the perish of the large structure, he explores how the current Taiwanese ideology be shaped by the historical trauma that has been transferred to the present time.
Wang experiments with a combination of being creator and subject in his film projects. By employing cases from field research and himself as the carrier to fabricate both the fictional and non-fictional elements, Wang presents multiple interpretations of the same historic moment from distinctively individual memories in order to explore the possibility of untold truths. He believes that the experimental film should be in a nomadic state. By combining digital shooting, 16mm film, and archival footage, he explores the way to liberate the film from the single mode of narrative, documentary, and experiment, and utilizes it as a way for viewers to experience complex content.
Maggie Wong makes art, writes about art, writes art, reads art, shares art, mentors artists, and is mentored by artists. She studies; gathering people, objects, and ideas around belonging, while making copies, and sometimes lists. She is interested in how objects guide identity formation by investigating objects’ affective limits, such as the noise produced by the scratched in used records or the marginalia in her family’s collection of seminal revolutionary texts. Maggie graduated from Sarah Lawrence College in 2011 and in 2018 received an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago where she now works as a lecturer. Additionally, she is the Associate Director of Iceberg Projects in Rogers Park. Her work has been published and shown by institutions and artist-run spaces now including ESS. Maggie Wong is from Oakland, CA, and now resides in Chicago.
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