Thursday, December 12th, light and color improviser Lindsay Packer premieres ECHOLOCATION, her third commissioned work as a 2019 ISSUE Artist-In-Residence. Throughout the year, 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 site.
In Call and Response: ECHOLOCATION, Packer collaborates with Alex Nathanson and Dylan Neely of Fan Letters in a nonlinear feedback loop of analog/digital chain reactions. Humans and machines interpret, amplify, and reposition one another’s moves as image and sound ricochet throughout ISSUE’s 22 Boerum space. Packer and Fan Letters sculpt sound with light, and shape light with sound, creating space for absurdity, rogue behavior, surprises, and moments of reassuring knowns. Photovoltaic electromechanical audio synthesis builds the soundtrack for cinema that is not a film but is a motion picture. Improvisational percussive machines play catch with sound and light waves. Rhythmic structures riff on form and function, rendering visible the invisible and redirecting expectations around cause and effect.
A laboratory of ad hoc discovery, ECHOLOCATION is the buzzing light beam escaping from the far side of a black hole, reshaped and reconfigured by its journey and not able to say exactly where it’s been. ECHOLOCATION is a visual score for a microscope aimed at a telescope attached to an ear-horn with headphones on. It is parallel play that sometimes crosses wires, resisting technological ease and foregrounding the impractical, anti-intuitive nature of creative process.
“Echolocation” determines spatial relationships through precise sensing and interpretation of reflected sound waves. ECHOLOCATION gets in its own way as effectively as possible at all times, casting its own shadows to establish where we are now -- so that we can take the next step.
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. Her 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. Packer collaborated with choreographer Melanie Maar for her first 2019 commission at ISSUE in Call and Response: DEPTH OF FIELD and with Anaïs Maviel for her second ISSUE commission in Call and Response: TRANSPOSITION. She is a 2019 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow in Architecture/Environmental Structures/Design, was a Fulbright Fellow to India in Installation Art and a two-time Artist-in-Residence at the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation. Her short film Motion at a Distance (with sound by Andrew Yong Hoon Lee) is an official selection of the upcoming New Orleans Film Festival and the Eyeworks Festival of Experimental Animation and is supported by a 2019 Media Arts Assistance Fund (MAAF) Distribution/Exhibition Support Grant from New York State Council on the Arts in Partnership with Wave Farm. Packer received a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She lives and works in Brooklyn.
Fan Letters is a multimedia collaboration between artist Alex Nathanson and musician Dylan Neely. Their work combines sound, video, and handmade electromechanical objects in playful, interactive performances. Shows oscillate between noise and chamber music, from experimental cinema to Saturday morning cartoons, and political negotiations to schoolyard games. Fan Letters has performed throughout North America and Europe and has been awarded multiple residencies at The Watermill Center. Alex Nathanson is a multimedia artist, engineer, and educator exploring practical and experimental applications of sustainable energy technologies. His artwork has been featured at the Museum of the Moving Image, Film Society of Lincoln Center, Anthology Film Archives, PS122 Gallery, Dome of Visions (Copenhagen, Denmark), and the Art Prospect Festival (St. Petersburg, Russia), among other venues. He has a M.S. in Integrated Digital Media from NYU Tandon School of Engineering. Composer and musician Dylan Neely has performed at The Museum of the Moving Image, ISSUE Project Room, Symphony Space, Lincoln Center, The Stone, MoMA PS1, and La MaMa, among other venues and has written music for theater & opera projects presented at The Drawing Center, The Tank, Columbia University, and The Watermill Center. He received a from B.A. Bard College at Simon’s Rock and an M.F.A. from Mills College with additional studies at Juilliard and at the Belgrade Faculty of Music on a Fulbright Fellowship.
