After 9 Evenings: Thomas Dexter

From September 25 to October 1, 2016 ISSUE Project Room presents After 9 Evenings: A 50th Anniversary Celebration, a dynamic series of performances, talks, screenings, and workshops to mark the 50th anniversary of 9 Evenings: Theatre & Engineering (1966).

Thomas Dexter’s performance work, best understood as a type of “live-filmmaking,” begins with the poetics of cinema as a vector for exploring physical translations and discursive negotiations between image and sound, signal and noise, and more broadly, representational systems. Along the way, various apparatuses of image and sound production are disarticulated and function is aggressively reframed. 16mm film loops are animated live and then destroyed, flicker patterns are created between asynchronous optical shutters, objects are fashioned into "expanded" screens, film and video chaotically interfere, and an evolving palette of tonal and textural sounds are extracted from disparate nodes within this process.

Thomas Dexter is an interdisciplinary artist based in Chicago and New York. Dexter’s solo and collaborative projects, spanning video works, experimental film, performance, and sound installation, have been exhibited, screened, and performed at venues internationally, including the Soloman R. Guggenheim Museum NYC, Microscope Gallery, Experimental Intermedia, PS1/MOMA, Roulette, The New York Museum of Art and Design, Sight and Sound Festival, Issue Project Room, the Mononoaware Festival, The Lesley Heller Workspace, The Invisible Dog, and ESP TV among others. Dexter studied Psychology at Bennington College and is currently an MFA candidate at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Dexter works as a “professional” filmmaker and sometimes assistant to experimental filmmaker and media artist Ernie Gehr.