Thursday, April 18th, light and color improviser Lindsay Packer premieres DEPTH OF FIELD, her first commissioned work as a 2019 ISSUE Artist-In-Residence. Throughout 2019, Packer creates new improvisational work in support of a research and performance project entitled Call and Response. Each program in Call and Response involves a new collaborator and builds a new conversation between elements of color, light, ephemeral form, movement, sound and space.
In Call and Response: DEPTH OF FIELD, Lindsay Packer collaborates with dancer and choreographer Melanie Maar. Sharing and, at times, exchanging the responsibilities of their own established practices in improvisation and making, the artists use light, color, repetition, movement and the sounds and reverberations that emanate from their movements to define and redefine the space around them. Light amplifies their smallest adjustments and decisions -- expanding beams of light and leading edges of shadow extend actions beyond the body. This work investigates the inter-relatedness of things in an unfolding conversation between the seen and unseen, between whispers and communication across distance.
As the artists foreground close observations of site and attention to the qualities of ordinary things, they also explore the performance space as one would investigate a found object, that, like a pebble or seashell, can be examined and held in the palm of the hand. Using light and movement, they call out the contingent nature of form, color, architecture, and body and the ways that time and structure are tightly connected to point of view, expectations, and memory.
Light represents a physical entity but is also an expression of movement: a description of space and time and variability all at once. Packer manipulates light and color to tip attention from the physical to the immaterial, allowing these two states of being to share the same three-dimensional space the audience occupies. She uses physical forms to build temporary geometries made of light and shadow. Every “prop” is found, temporarily re-purposed/re-viewed and returned to its source. Nothing is fixed or settled or permanent.
Optically and in a photographic sense, “DEPTH OF FIELD” describes the degree of focus in an image. It implies a combination of sharp focus and blurriness within the same photograph or view. Practically, “DEPTH OF FIELD” sets up areas of clarity against less-defined zones that retain an inherent sense of mystery. Packer and Maar establish this hazy border around “DEPTH OF FIELD” as a mode of inquiry, applying curiosity and attention to bring sense and meaning to an image that is only partly defined.
Lindsay Packer plays with the call and response of color and light, form and site in photography, film and video, installations, and improvisational performance. With a spontaneous spirit and non-hierarchical approach to materials and process, she creates immersive environments that are integral to and inseparable from their architectural and sonic contexts. These analog RGB color spaces are luminous, temporary geometries that question divisions between analog and digital ways of seeing and understanding. Packer’s work connects the visual language of painting to the kineticism of early cinema while allowing site, movement, chance, and improvisation to inform color and composition. A Fulbright Fellow to India in Installation Art and two-time Artist-in-Residence at the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, Packer received a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. In 2018, she performed as part of Melanie Maar’s collaborative Line Death Dance project at the Chocolate Factory Theater (LIC), had solo exhibitions at Transmitter, Custom Program, and ChaShaMa at One Brooklyn Bridge Park (all in Brooklyn), and premiered an animated 16mm film at the MONO NO AWARE XI festival of cinema arts. She lives and works in Brooklyn.
Melanie Maar is a Viennese artist based in New York City. An intimacy between knowing and not knowing, structure and meaning, movement and sound, animalism and humanism, femaleism and objectism, repetition and novelty guides her work and the relationships to performative contexts and collaborators. She currently has a two-year performance residency project at The Chocolate Factory Theater called Line Death Dance - Lindsay was a collaborator during the first phase in 2018. Continuous collaborations with sound artists like Kenta Nagai, Christian Schroeder, Anaïs Maviel, Masters of Ceremony and Sir Anthony Braxton have inspired her for the last 10 years. In 2015, Melanie was awarded the Grant to Artists from The Foundation for Contemporary Arts. Her performance work has been presented in Vienna, Berlin, Mexico City and New York, where she is also teaching and mentoring through her ‘process as guide’ series. Recently she taught at Movement Research, The New School and TanzQuartier Vienna. Choreographers she has worked with include luciana achugar, RoseAnne Spradlin, Daria Faïn and Walter Dundervill. Melanie co-curated the Moving Sounds Festival for the NY Austrian Cultural Forum 2013, the Spring Festival for Movement Research and Entkunstung Performance events in Vienna.
