ISSUE's 2021 season programs are FREE to stream. In lieu of purchasing tickets, please consider making a $25 suggested donation (or an amount that you feel is meaningful) in support of ISSUE's Artist-In-Residence programs and Artist Fund. Enabling the fullscreen function is recommended. The length of this piece is approximately 27 minutes.
Friday, March 26th at 8pm EST, sound/visual artist, improviser, and performer Austin Sley Julian opens his 2021 ISSUE residency with the premiere of Observitor Ghosting. This piece is hosted at The Living Gallery, and will be streamed from their space in Bushwick, Brooklyn.
Notes from Austin Sley Julian on Observitor Ghosting:
Remembering projections into the tangible, Observitor Ghosting projects into our voided home, our empty city, a signal to find reason in our empty entropy, uncertain. Are we speaking when we project? How far shall we go? What’s on the other side of the screen? I'm projecting into my home, out of necessity, to find commonality into the rapidly collapsing channels of my humanity and the humanity of those around me. Observitor Ghosting is my method, and the phenomena that occurs therein. The use of my projections, the reinforcement of audio/visual looping and feedback act only to reinforce and accentuate the emptiness of the space between us. But maybe sound is the actuator? Maybe there could be a hope in an empty projection without a screen. The overused landscape, caked in grime, is our only canvas to paint an understanding of each other here. Gifted with a remote view? Or gifted with a blind spot? Everything I use to make this projection is about to fall apart, is a phoenix from the air. Who owns airspace? Who owns New York? How much light can you pump into the air to make it real? Quickly.
Austin Sley Julian is a visual and sound artist, improviser, and performer born in Brooklyn, NY. Julian has worked in many visual and aural media, making countless pieces through the years, touring nationally with several music projects that he has founded, namely Sediment club, Sunk Heaven, and Signal Break. Using prepared guitar, handmade instruments, discarded artifacts and debris, Austin Sley Julian creates moving, physically jagged, harsh gestures that hurl at their audiences. Through these kinetic sounds and sculptures Julian strives to convey a physically unstable energy in his work that reflects the technological society in which it was created. In Julian’s work, structures are constructing and deconstructing in the same gesture. Sounds float and sink in the same note. Image is viscerally close and encompassing, all in the same moment. Julian’s work shows an attraction to the aesthetic that is created by this dichotomy between rhythm, structure, and total collapse. His work strives to keep the audience in a constant conflict between these polar extremes. Austin Sley Julian as an artist is aiming to evoke feelings of anguish, frustration, and inherent conflict to confront the ugly instability of this condition with realism and “pessimistic optimism.”
