Liz Harris (Grouper) and Paul Clipson present the NY premiere of HYPNOSIS DISPLAY, an evening-length original live sound and 16mm film collaboration exploring impressionistic, emotional and sensory environments found within the vast natural and urban landscapes of America.
HYPNOSIS DISPLAY envelops the viewer within an expansive, unique sound and image experience. Both artists use formats that emote sonically and visually unique moments—cassette tape and 16mm film—which combine to create an especially unique and resonant live environment. The dialogue between these sensitive and nostalgic materials evokes a dynamic tension between beauty and dissonance. Grouper layers performed and field recorded music to create hypnotic soundscapes cloaked within her vocals and tape loops. Clipson's collaged, super-impositioned 16mm films, projected from his own film projector within the theatre space, seek to invite the audience to participate in a collective mind's-eye trip, traversing Grouper's musical language to create startling, revelatory associations, as if each viewer is experiencing a hallucinatory waking dream.
Neither image nor sound takes precedence: the two interact and combine preserving a raw sense of the discovery that field recordings and film rushes often yield.
Liz Harris lives and works on the Oregon Coast. She has been recording, performing, and releasing solo material under the name Grouper since 2005 on various imprints including Kranky, Type, and her own YELLOWELECTRIC. Her work is characterized by a fascination with paradox, literal and impressionistic experience of environment and human behavior. Her music compositions have been commissioned and shown across Europe and the United States, including Galerie Zdb in Portugal, the Berkeley Art Museum in California, and ISSUE Project Room in NYC. She has recently completed art and music residencies in Lisbon, Marfa, TX, and the Bunya Mountains, and was awarded residencies in 2014 with Signal Fire and The Ucross Foundation.
Paul Clipson is a San Francisco-based filmmaker who often collaborates with sound artists and musicians on films, live performances, and installations. His work has been exhibited and performed both nationally and internationally at such festivals as the New York Film Festival, Edinburgh Film Festival, and the Rotterdam International Film Festival. His Super 8 and 16mm films aim to bring to light subconscious visual preoccupations that reveal themselves while working in a stream of consciousness manner, combining densely layered, in-camera edited studies of figurative and abstract environments, in a process that encourages unplanned-for results, responding to and conversing with the temporal qualities of musical composition and live performance.