ISSUE Project Room is thrilled to host pioneering multimedia artist Joshua White and his legendary Joshua Light Show for a week of unique audiovisual collaborations. The residency will involve White’s iconic projections alongside an incredible roster of musicians, with a different musical genre represented on each night of the residency.
The Joshua Light Show involves a team of video and light artists, led by White and his senior collaborator, Bec Stupak (Honeygun Labs) to improvise live synesthetic visuals behind a giant rear projection screen, involving the “liquid light” techniques he developed at Bill Graham’s Fillmore East during the late 1960s. In addition, each performance of the light show will feature contributions from a different live-cinema artist, including Seth Kirby, Zach Layton, and Mighty Robot A/V Squad. The residency is curated and produced in collaboration with Nick Hallett and concludes a month of programming at ISSUE Project Room devoted to the Ecstatic Moment.
Joshua White is a New York based artist and television director. He studied theater at Carnegie Mellon University and film at University of Southern California. He is well known for developing the lightshow at the rock venue Fillmore East, appearing with artists such as Jefferson Airplane, The Grateful Dead, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, The Doors, Yayoi Kusama, and Led Zeppelin, among many others. During this time, he also created special effects for the film Midnight Cowboy. After the lightshow’s performance at Woodstock in 1969, White shifted to television. His directing credits include Seinfeld, The Max Headroom Show, Club MTV and Inside The Actors Studio. In the 1990s, White returned to creating fine art installations in collaboration with Michael Smith, and in 2004 developed a new light show with comic artist and designer, Gary Panter. His first show since 1969 billed as “Joshua Light Show” was performed in April 2007 at The Kitchen with music by Delia Gonzales and Gavin Russom. His artwork has shown at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C., Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, Tate Liverpool, Künsthalle Schim Frankfurt, Blanton Museum of Art, Austin, and the Künsthalle Wien. The Center for Visual Music recently released a DVD of his “liquid loops.” Upcoming show at Centre Pompidou.
Bec Stupak is a video artist and founding member of Honeygun Labs, a multimedia project working within the genres of music video, installation, and live VJing. Collaborations with fine-art collective Assume Vivid Astro Focus have been exhibited at the 2004 Whitney Biennial, Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, and Tate Liverpool. In 2006, Deitch Projects, presented her first solo show, “Radical Earth Magic Flower.” www.honeygunlabs.com.
Saturday, May 31
The Joshua Light Show with:
Invisible Conga People (Eric Tsai, Justin Simon)
Soft Circle (Hisham Bharoocha)
ISSUE Project Room’s Joshua Light Show Residency is made possible through Presentation Funds from the Experimental Television Center. The Experimental Television Center’s Presentation Funds program is supported by the New York State Council on the Arts.