Volume (IV) is an improvising quartet featuring electroacoustic harpist Shelley Burgon, turntablist Maria Chavez, laptop artist Stephan Moore and electroacoustic flutist Suzanne Thorpe. Individually these players are singular voices in the New York scene. Together they create an inimitable sonic entity, luminous and enigmatic, without obvious exit or entrance points.
Expansion/Contraption is a four-evening performance/installation, collaboratively conceived by the four members of Volume (IV) (Shelley Burgon, Maria Chavez, Stephan Moore, and Suzanne Thorpe) and visual artists Chris Harvey, David Schafer, Steve Milton, Vince Pan, Heather Dewey-Hagborg and Thomas Dexter. Through the constant recording and resurfacing of their performances, the members of Volume (IV) negotiate a collective present with around the obstacles and opportunities of the fragmented past. For each performance, the Issue Project Room space is transformed by a different visual artist or team of artists, re-imagining the relationship between the room, the performers, the audience, and Issue's Floating Points Hemisphere speaker system.
9/27 - Chris Harvey
Chris Harvey is a multimedia artist based in Troy, NY who utilizes painting, installation, and performance to create abstract worlds in which to explore the transformative potential of placement, movement, color, and time. As an award-winning motion graphics art director, Harvey has provided visual support to major broadcast networks, museums, universities, and established composers. He has responded to a career in media packaging by focusing a more contemplative personal interest in the understated poetry of the still image, the power of incremental change, and the unique rewards of sustained attention over extended duration.
Originally trained in painting and art history, Harvey has combined studies in animation, color theory, Hindustani raga, and Buddhist psychology to synthesize a visual vocabulary in which formal arrangement and a decorative impulse are offset by a mischievously recombinant aesthetic to prompt an oblique reflection on the pleasure and mystery of perception itself.
9/28 - David Schafer
David Schafer is a visual and sound artist working in sculpture, sound, sound performance, and graphics. His work embodies language, site, and architecture through the appropriation of modernist tropes, popular culture, and theory. His work is concerned with the intelligibility, translation, and structures of language and architecture. Much of his work stems from this complex of situations, both spatial and linguistic.
Schafer has shown nationally and internationally and has received several public commissions. Most recently he participated in LOL: A Decade in Antic Art at the Contemporary Museum in Baltimore, MD. In 2010, he permanently installed Separated United Forms at the Huntington Hospital, Pasadena, CA, and participated in the Whitney Biennial with What Should a Museum Sound Like?, a sound performance and sculpture. He is currently a visiting critic for Cornell Art and Architecture Program in NY, and has previously taught at SVA, Cooper Union, Rutgers, and Parsons in NY and Otis, Cal Arts, and Art Center College of Design in Los Angeles, where he was the director of the sculpture and installation track.
Schafer was born in Kansas City, MO and received his BA from the University of Missouri, Kansas City, MO, and his MFA from the University of Texas, Austin, TX. He moved to NY in 1983 and spent 10 years in LA. He currently lives and works in NY since 2006.
9/29 - Steve Milton and Vince Pan
Steven Milton is a composer, producer, and music researcher whose work focuses on the intersection of popular and experimental artistic practices. Milton received a Master’s degree in Musicology from the New England Conservatory of Music where he studied a variety of musical styles and completed a thesis examining postmodern aesthetics in Beck’s album Odelay. Milton’s work can be heard across various media including television, radio, internet, film, dance, and gallery installation. In 2009, Milton founded a group called, Lavalier, a multifaceted collective of artists who perform and record chamber-experimental pop music.
Vince Pan AIA, LEED AP is an architect and founding principal of Analogue Studio, an interdisciplinary design firm in Cambridge, MA. Analogue Studio brings together disparate design disciplines to create experiences that resonate. In addition to designing award-winning architectural projects featured in Metropolis, Inhabitat, and Architectural Record, Vince has also designed several multi-sensory art installations and temporary exhibits for American Express and Exclusively.In.
9/30 - Heather Dewey-Hagborg and Thomas Dexter
Heather Dewey-Hagborg is an information artist who is interested in exploring art as research and public inquiry. Traversing media ranging from algorithms to installation, her work seeks to question fundamental assumptions underpinning perceptions of human nature, technology and the environment.
Thomas Dexter is a Brooklyn-based artist and performer. Thomas' work enacts exchanges of perceptual currency using performative and process-based strategies. Thomas' moving image work, Errata.Cinema, is an ongoing series of performances and installations that seek to subvert the conventional relationships between film/apparatus/author/viewer/space. Thomas' solo and collaborative works have been featured at MOMA PS1, Experimental Intermedia, Roulette, The Elizabeth Foundation Project Space, and most recently at the New Museum Festival of New Ideas 2011.
Thomas and Heather are both part of the Future Archaeology collective.