Town Friday | July 31, 2015
Complex(ity) Project Space Features: CACOPHONY by Gina Siepel with Sara Smith
Event Begins at 5 PM
CACOPHONY is a series of silent excursions designed by Gina Siepel, focused on the act of listening and on immersion in the surrounding landscape. In this iteration of CACOPHONY, Siepel and choreographer Sara Smith will offer an introduction to “radical defamiliarization”: a state of awareness, receptivity, and de-habituation from everyday perceptions of environment. Participants will be led through a warm up of simple movements, a reflective writing exercise, and a guided walk in silence.
Siepel writes: “Henry David Thoreau explored the defamiliarization of perception, deliberately creating experiences that resulted in a form of ‘radical unpreparedness,’ that allowed him to loosen the grip over his perceptual experiences held by habit and social convention. This state of disorientation, or lostness, has ethical and political implications.”
CACOPHONY has been exhibited on the Bronx River and Jamaica Bay National Wildlife Refuge, as part of Flux Factory’s Sea Worthy series of excursions. This workshop adapts CACOPHONY in terms of “defamiliarizing” modes of land surveying that Siepel developed with Smith, and other collaborators, for the exhibition Walden, revisited at the Decordova Sculpture Park and Museum in 2014-2015.
CACOPHONY is presented by Experience Economies as part of their session "Landscape Experiences"
The Complex(ity) Project Space is located at 37b Main Street, Narrowsburg, NY.
Please Click Here for Directions
Experience Economies: Landscape Experience
Session Leaders
Gavin Kroeber and Rebecca Uchill
Landscape Experience 2015 Fellows
Cari Freno | Independent/Virginia
Claire Haik | School of Visual Arts
Danielle A. Allinice | Independent/Washington
Eric M. Diehl | Virginia Commonwealth University
Jennifer Brook | Independent/New York
Katherine Bickmore | Independent/Hamilton College/New York
Michelle Kelly Rogers | Independent/Florida
Rachel L. Cohn | Virginia Commonwealth University
Rebecca Conroy | Independent/Australia
Ruth Patir | Columbia University
Vered Engelhard | Independent/Peru
Misha Wyllie | Virginia Commonwealth University
2015 Mildred Fellows
Christopher Beer | Supervisor of Entanglement
Mariana Gutierrez | Ministry of Comfort
Isobel Rose Lister | Officer Of Complex(ity)
Cameron Klavsen | Resident Artist in Complex(ity)
Jaquel Theis | Land Steward 1
Juliet Dunn | Land Steward 2
Gina Siepel (Born in West Valley, New York, 1974) is an interdisciplinary artist based in Greenfield, MA, whose works explore American identity, nature, history, gender, performance, and craft practice. Recent exhibitions include the DeCordova Museum, Marlboro College, Colby Museum of Art, Flux Factory, SPACE Gallery, Amherst College, and the ICA at MECA.
She holds a BFA from SUNY Purchase and an MFA from the Maine College of Art, and was a Zorach-Bingham Fellow at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. She received grants from the Berkshire Taconic Foundation, the Puffin Foundation, and the Northampton Arts Council.
Sara Smith is an interdisciplinary choreographer and librarian, who creates performances and other works which traverse dance, visual art, writing, and historical research. She has received support for her work from The LEF Foundation, Massachusetts Cultural Council, Maine Arts Commission, Mary Duke Biddle Foundation, and the North Carolina Arts Council, residency fellowships from The MacDowell Colony and Yaddo, and is a 2015 creative research fellow at The American Antiquarian Society.
She lives in Greenfield, Massachusetts.
This program is hosted as part of the session "Landscape Experience," organized by Experience Economies, the curatorial/event-based research duo of Gavin Kroeber and Rebecca Uchill. The session brings together artists, urbanists, writers, curators, historians, and other invited guests to address the entanglements of “landscape”: a knot of often-contradictory concepts, histories, and traditions, the word landscape implies both nature and culture, representation and direct experience, physical landmarks and the immaterial practices and ideologies that give shape and meaning to them. Town Friday and Social Saturday events during this session will open these ongoing discussions to a broader public. All are welcome.