ISSUE Project Room is pleased to announce the final installment of Keith Connolly's 2016 residency, L. GRAY + T Thayer present: AN EVACUATION MUSIC.
Keith Connolly is a New York-based artist born in Brooklyn. Under the alias L. GRAY, Connolly has performed solo and with a range of collaborators including Tom Thayer, Chie Mukai and others. In 1992, he dropped out of SUNY Buffalo, abandoning studies in English literature to form No-Neck Blues Band with Jason Meagher and Pat Murano. For over 20 years NNCK explored simultaneity through improvised performance and encrypted documentation, performed extensively throughout the US, Canada and Europe, and published more than 50 LPs, CDs and singles. He has appeared in theatrical productions by the Wooster Group, and is a member of the New York City Players. As an organizer, he runs the label HALATERN, etc., and co-created the Numina Lente performance festival with Jay Sanders in 2011. He is a contributing music editor for BOMB magazine.
Tom Thayer employs a ‘naïve’ look to provide access to a variety of experiences often marginalized by art: adolescent obsessions, visionary mythologies, and private fantasies that delve deep into the unsettled recesses of gesture and mimetic storytelling... As an educator, Thayer is interested in theories of collaborative pedagogy, including the musical experimentation developed in England around Cornelius Cardew and his Scratch Orchestra, a compositional project conducted entirely by untrained, amateur participants. In Thayer’s own collaborative workshops, theatrical scenarios—including shadow puppetry and sound collage—are intended to ignite what he calls the “creative power of collective action.” His longstanding interest in psychedelia, seen from this perspective, takes on new significance: the psychedelic, before it was consigned to a period style, aimed for a new form of sociability based on unmediated sensory communication. Through his work, Thayer revives its potential. --Michael Sanchez"
Thayer's work has been exhibited/performed at venues including: The 2012 Whitney Biennial, The Museum of Modern Art, MoMA PS1, White Columns, The Kitchen, The Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, IL, SculptureCenter, The Living Theater and ISSUE Project Room. He teaches Painting/ Drawing and Diverse Media at The City College of New York, CUNY.
Organized by Lawrence Kumpf.
