Mind Over Mirrors, AKA Jaime Fennelly, performs with dancer and musician Miguel Gutierrez as part of Fennelly's two-night residency at ISSUE Project Room. After four years of constant collaboration, trans-continental performance, cohabitation and detritus exorcising from 2001 - 2004 as their duo Sabotage and the early formative years of The Powerful People, this evening marks the first time Fennelly and Gutierrez have performed together in over eight years.
Mind Over Mirrors is the solitary reeling of American harmoniumist/electronicist Jaime Fennelly. Known as a founding member of the late Peeesseye (with Chris Forsyth & Fritz Welch), and psychedelic free jazz trio Acid Birds, Fennelly began developing Mind Over Mirrors when he moved from Bushwick/Brooklyn, NY to a remote island in the Salish Sea of Washington State from 2007 - 2010. Utilizing an Indian pedal harmonium, oscillators, tape delays, and an assortment of synthesizing processors, Fennelly bends slowly-building, repetitive melodies into massive sonic mountains, that fits somewhere between a droned-out American Primitive, and early-Kosmische aural territory.
Miguel Gutierrez, a dance and music artist based in New York, has been called “one of our most provocative and necessary artistic voices” by Eva Yaa Asantewaa of Dance Magazine. He makes solo and group pieces with a variety of artists under the moniker Miguel Gutierrez and the Powerful People. His work, characterized by the immersive quality of the attentive state that it imposes on the audience, centers around enduring philosophical questions about desire, longing and the search for meaning. His work has toured internationally at several festivals and venues and has received support from Creative Capital, Jerome Foundation, Rockefeller MAP Fund NYFA, NEA and NPN. In 2010 he received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Foundation for Contemporary Art, and United States Artists. He is the winner of three New York Dance and Performance "Bessie" awards. WHEN YOU RISE UP, a book of his performance texts, is available from 53rd State Press. He also invented DEEP AEROBICS, an absurdist workout for the radical in all of us. For his new project he is researching the overlapping and divergent conceptions of “mind” in the fields of neurology, embodied philosophy, somatic practices, improvisation and the paranormal.
