Saturday, September 21, light and color improviser Lindsay Packer premieres TRANSPOSITION, her second 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: TRANSPOSITION, Packer collaborates with composer and performer Anaïs Maviel to reveal subliminal complexity within the synaesthetic wave behaviors of light and sound. Packer and Maviel conjure the harmonics inherent in their fast-traveling wave forms: constructive interference, reflection, diffraction and reverberation result in additive color mixing, formal repetition, twinning, spectral shifts, gradient curves and transparent tones. Prismatic expansions and compressions of color and sound re-shape and are shaped by the architecture of ISSUE’s 22 Boerum space -- the space itself becomes both sender and receiver, reflecting and absorbing waves of sound and light.
TRANSPOSITION ushers into consciousness what is often hidden in plain sight. Foregrounding attention to movement and latency, luminous temporary geometries and cascading shadow forms transition from imperceptible to undeniably present. Together, Packer and Maviel demonstrate subtle mutability and crystalline coherence in relationships between sound, vision, body and site, enacting slowness within speed, locating still frames within persistence of vision.
As a musical term, ‘transposition’ describes a shift in key, the relocation or translation of a composition. Transposition counters inertia, setting an intention to carry what we already know into a new place, to find out what is possible outside a given arrangement. Both artists work with non-linear processes: reversible, impermanent, reframing rather than rebuilding. TRANSPOSITION crosses boundaries between physical presence and potentiality to trace new paths that neither artist could find alone.
Packer and Maviel approach thresholds of perception non-hierarchically, as archeologists might approach a patch of ground: each inch of earth and every decision to dig below the surface offer equal potential for discovery, both of what is suspected and what might never have been imagined. In TRANSPOSITION, a bright edge unexpectedly stretches and bends, an animal-like sound comes around the corner, layers of shadow pull color into form, silence holds energy, the observer-body adjusts to a new experience of time and space. Once revealed, these discoveries carry forward in mind and muscle memory as fractal subsets of lived experience.
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 April 2019 commission at ISSUE in Call and Response: DEPTH OF FIELD, an unfolding conversation and performance crossing sound, light and circumstance. She is a 2019 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow in Architecture/Environmental Structures/Design, and her short film Motion at a Distance, with sound by Andrew Yong Hoon Lee, is screening at film festivals nationally and internationally with the support of a 2019 Media Arts Assistance Fund (MAAF) Distribution/Exhibition Support Grant from New York State Council on the Arts in Partnership with Wave Farm. 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. She lives and works in Brooklyn.
Anaïs Maviel is a vocalist, percussionist, composer, writer and community facilitator. Her work focuses on the function of music as essential to settling common grounds, addressing Relation, and creating utopian future. Involved at the crossroads of mediums - music, visual art, dance, theater and performance art - she has been an in-demand creative force for artists such as William Parker, Daria Faïn, Shelley Hirsh, César Alvarez, Steffani Jemison - to give a sense of her eclectic company. As a leader she is dedicated to substantial creations from solo to large ensembles, music direction of cross-disciplinary works, and to expanding the power of music as a healing & transformative act. She performs and teaches extensively in New York, throughout North, South & Central America, and Europe. Her solo debut hOULe, out on NY based Gold Bolus Recordings, received international acclaim, and she is the 2019 recipient of the Van Lier Fellowship at Roulette Intermedium which allows her to further develop her composition language for voice and mixed ensemble, premiering new works in New York City.
