Angel Nevarez & Valerie Tevere present Sound Check

SPACE is pleased to present HOTLINE, an interactive group show featuring soundworks by artists, musicians, scholars, performers and poets.

As the name suggests, the exhibition features eight listening stations where visitors can hear songs, artworks and readings on custom-built payphones designed by Smooth Technology, a New York City-based team of artist engineers. Each payphone is programmed with a distinct set of recordings that automatically play when the hook switch is released for a choose-your-own-audio-adventure experience. No two listening stations are alike.

The works in HOTLINE range from the fancifully dulcet and intellectually stimulating to funkier versions of hold music and hard-to-listen-to noise. A limited edition vinyl record printed at the conclusion of the exhibition will serve as an archive and commemorative object for the project. Performances by featured artists are scheduled throughout the run of the exhibition.

HOTLINE was created with a history of phone-based projects in mind. Some of the inspiration for this project comes from:

• Erykah Badu’s mixtape But You Can’t Use My Phone
• Aura Satz’s Dial tone drone featuring a Pauline Oliveros and Laurie Spiegel
• The Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago’s 1969 project, Art by Telephone
• Laurie Anderson’s Telephone song
• The Nokia 8210 cell phone
• Princess Nokia
• The Hall and Oates Emergency Hotline
• The Jerky Boys prank call album and others like it that came of age during the 1990s
• Giorno Poetry Systems
• Amber Stucke and Demian DinéYazhi’s audio project, Talking to Plants

Support for HOTLINE is provided by Smooth Technology, Richardson Allen, Pickwick Independent Press, Big Blood and by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.

PARTICIPATING ARTISTS

Selected by President Obama as the fifth inaugural poet in U.S. history, Richard Blanco (Bethel, ME) is the youngest and the first Latino, immigrant, and gay person to serve in such a role. Born in Madrid to Cuban exile parents and raised in Miami, the negotiation of cultural identity characterizes his three collections of poetry: City of a Hundred Fires, which received the Agnes Starrett Poetry Prize from the University of Pittsburgh Press; Directions to The Beach of the Dead, recipient of the Beyond Margins Award from the PEN American Center; and Looking for The Gulf Motel, recipient of the Paterson Poetry Prize and the Thom Gunn Award. He has also authored the memoirs For All of Us, One Today: An Inaugural Poet’s Journey and The Prince of Los Cocuyos: A Miami Childhood, winner of a Lambda Literary Award. His inaugural poem “One Today” was published as a children’s book, in collaboration with renowned illustrator Dav Pilkey. His latest book, Boundaries, a collaboration with photographer Jacob Hessler, challenges the physical and psychological dividing lines that shadow the United States. A new book of poems, How to Love a Country, is forthcoming from Beacon Press in April 2019. Blanco has written occasional poems for the re-opening of the U.S. Embassy in Cuba, Freedom to Marry, the Tech Awards of Silicon Valley, and the Boston Strong benefit concert following the Boston Marathon bombings. He is a Woodrow Wilson Fellow and has received numerous honorary doctorates. He has taught at Georgetown University, American University, and Wesleyan University. He serves as the first Education Ambassador for The Academy of American Poets.

Instagram: @poetrichardblanco

Olivia Block is a media artist and composer. She creates experimental music for releases and concerts, site-specific multi-speaker installations, sound design for cinema and scores for orchestra and chamber groups. Her compositions include electronic textures, field recordings, amplified objects and orchestral instruments. She performs using oscillators, microphones, amplified objects, shortwave radio, and many other sound-making materials. Feature articles about Block have been published in The Wire, NPR’s Morning Edition, MusicWorks, The Chicago Reader, Fluid Radio, and many others. Block tours internationally and resides in Chicago, IL. Her latest CD release, 132 Ranks, is currently published on Room40.

Instagram: @letter_beacon

Nadia Botello (b. 1986) is an artist, composer, engineer, and public-interest technologist based in San Antonio, TX. Her work has been exhibited and performed at MATA Festival, Nameless Sound, Clocktower, Fairmount Water Works, Flux Factory, Icebox Project Space, the Rail Park, the Arthur Ross Gallery, and James Turrell’s Skyspace “Gathered Leading”, among other venues. She’s lectured and developed workshops at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Johns Hopkins University (MA), the University of Pennsylvania (MFA/PhD), and Columbia University (MFA). She has self-released two full-length albums — “Saint Shë: Ska jag berätta en hemlighet?” and “Emerald Rd”.

Raven Chacon (Toronto, Canada) is a composer, performer and installation artist from Fort Defiance, Navajo Nation. As a solo artist, collaborator, or with Postcommodity, Chacon has exhibited or performed at Whitney Biennial, documenta 14, REDCAT, Musée d’art Contemporain de Montréal, San Francisco Electronic Music Festival, Chaco Canyon, Ende Tymes Festival, 18th Biennale of Sydney, and The Kennedy Center. Every year, he teaches 20 students to write string quartets for the Native American Composer Apprenticeship Project (NACAP). He is the recipient of the United States Artists fellowship in Music, The Creative Capital award in Visual Arts, The Native Arts and Cultures Foundation artist fellowship, and the American Academy’s Berlin Prize for Music Composition. He lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico and Toronto, Ontario.

Instagram: @ravenchcn

Demian DinéYazhi ́ (born 1983) is an Indigenous Diné transdisciplinary artist born to the clans Naasht’ézhí Tábąąhá (Zuni Clan Water’s Edge) and Tódích’íí’nii (Bitter Water). Growing up in the colonized border town of Gallup, New Mexico, the evolution of DinéYazhi ́’s work has been influenced by their ancestral ties to traditional Diné culture, ceremony, matrilineal upbringing, the sacredness of land, and the importance of intergenerational knowledge. Through research, mining community archives, and social collaboration, DinéYazhi ́ highlights the intersections of Radical Indigenous Queer Feminist identity and political ideology while challenging the white noise of contemporary art. They have recently exhibited at Whitney Museum of American Art (2018), Henry Art Gallery (2018), Pioneer Works (2018), CANADA, NY (2017); and Cooley Art Gallery (2017). DinéYazhi ́ is the founder of the Indigenous artist/activist initiative, R.I.S.E.: Radical Indigenous Survivance & Empowerment. DinéYazhi ́ also serves as co-editor of Locusts: A Post-Queer Nation Zine. They are the recipient of the Henry Art Museum’s Brink Award (2017), Hallie Ford Fellow in the Visual Arts (2018), and Eiteljorg Contemporary Art Fellow (2019).

Instagram: @heterogeneoushomosexual

E. Jane (Philadelphia, PA) is a Black woman, conceptual artist, sound designer and musician. Their work is a critical inquiry surrounding softness, safety, Alice Walker’s womanism, futurity, cyberspace and how subjugated bodies navigate media/the media. Their interdisciplinary practice incorporates text, digital images, video, performance, sound-based, sculpture, textile and installation works. A central facet of Jane’s practice lies in their performance persona, MHYSA, an underground pop star for the cyber resistance. MHYSA operates in Jane’s Lavendra/Recovery (2015-), an iterative multimedia installation, and out in the world. Jane considers this project a total work of art, or Gesamtkunstwerk, that expresses their interdisciplinary approach to art and praxis surrounding Black liberation and womanism. MHYSA released the Hivemind EP on NON in early 2016 and was listed in Artforum’s “Best of 2016: Music”. Highlight performances include the ICA and Cafe OTO in London, 3HD in Berlin, NRML in Mexico City, Borealis in Bergen, Rewire in The Hague, Counterflows in Glasgow, Donau in Krems, Moogfest in Durham and HOCO Fest in Tucson where she opened for Dean Blunt and Lil B. They have shown work at The Kitchen, MoCADA and MoMA PS1 as one half of sound duo SCRAAATCH. They have also shown at CP Projects Space and Studio Museum 127 in New York, Gallery 400 and Museum Of Contemporary Art (Chicago), Visual Arts Center (Austin), Newspace Center for Photography (Portland), Edel Assanti and IMT Gallery (London), Bar Babette (Berlin), Gallery of Modern Art (Glasgow), Dawid Radziszewski Gallery (Warsaw), Gstaad, Switzerland and Tensquared Gallery (online).

Instagram: @mhysa301

Since establishing himself as a preeminent voice in contemporary electro-acoustic study, Jason Lescalleet (Berwick, ME) has exploded the notion of what is possible within the realm of tape-based music. His recorded catalog acknowledges a diversity of application, from lo-fi reel-to-reel soundscaping and work for hand-held cassette machines, to digital sampling and computer generated composition. Lescalleet’s live actions further expand his oeuvre to include work with video, dance, performance art and multi-media concerns. In the past two decades, Lescalleet has gradually and painstakingly compiled a compelling discography on notable labels such as Erstwhile, RRR, Intransitive Recordings, Kye, Celebrate Psi-Phenomenon, Hanson Records, Chondritic Sound, and most recently via his own Glistening Examples imprint. He has collaborated with Kevin Drumm, Aaron Dilloway, Graham Lambkin, Phill Niblock, Joe Colley, John Hudak, Rafael Toral, Thomas Ankersmit, and CM Von Hausswolff, among others, and during this time he’s built a solid reputation for delivering a visceral live experience in concert. He currently lives in Berwick, Maine where he works and operates the Glistening Examples publishing label and the Glistening Labs studio for audio recording and mastering services.

Instagram: @jasonlescalleet

Maria Murphy (Philadelphia, PA) is a lecturer in the Department of Music at Rowan University and the Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies program at the University of Pennsylvania. Her work examines the relationship between music technologies and body politics through multimedia performance art, American experimentalism, and aesthetic activism in the 20th and 21st centuries. Her dissertation (University of Pennsylvania, 2018) demonstrated how the 1980s performance art of Laurie Anderson, Karen Finley, and Yoko Ono participated in historic shifts concerning the circulation and industrialization of information among new digital media, the production of healthy and sick bodies during the HIV/AIDS epidemic, and the political fictions of gender and sexuality within the Feminist Sex Wars. Her writing has been published in the Routledge Companion to Popular Music and Gender, the International Association for Popular Music—United States blog, Sonic Circulations, Title Magazine, Present Tense Pamphlets, and is forthcoming in the collection Popular Music and the Politics of Hope: Queer and Feminist Interventions. Murphy is also interested in developing creative spaces for hands-on research. She is the co-founder of Listening (to) Cyborgs: A Media Archaeology Workshop on Sound Technologies (listeningtocyborgs.com). As an extension of her research-practice, Murphy has performed at Vox Populi, Slought, and Fringe Arts Scratch Night.

Instagram: @mariaelainemurphy

Angel Nevarez and Valerie Tevere (New York, NY) are multidisciplinary artists whose projects investigate contemporary music and sound, the electromagnetic spectrum, dissent, and public fora. Their research interests lie in the intersection between art, music, and civic action/responsibility, and historical moments that resonate through distinct musical instrumentation and sonorous traditions.The duo have exhibited and screened their work at MoMA, The Guggenheim Museum, Creative Time, and New Museum in New York; Manifesta 8/ Spain; Museo de Arte Raúl Anguiano, Guadalajara, Mexico; Henie Onstad Art Centre, Høvikodden/Oslo, Norway, and elsewhere. The first US survey of their work was exhibited at Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia in 2016. Both were Studio Fellows at The Whitney Museum’s Independent Study Program, artists-in-residence at the International Artists Studio Program in Sweden (IASPIS), and have received grants from Creative Capital, Art Matters, the NEA, and Franklin Furnace. Tevere is Professor of Media Culture at the City University of New York, College of Staten Island. Nevarez is a musician, and Faculty at Parsons School of Design, and the MFA Fine Arts Program at the School of Visual Arts, New York.

Instagram: @vteverez @nevarezbpm

Leslie Ross (South Penobscot, ME) has a formal background in classical music and early performance practice. She took a plunge into the free improv scene of downtown NYC in the mid 80’s and has immersed herself in experimental music ever since. Her connected, parallel, work as baroque bassoon builder also opened up into explorations of invented instruments and sound installations at the same time. In June 2014 she relocated her music studio, workshop and living quarters to an old canning factory in rural Maine, where she also now houses The Cannery at South Penobscot, a performance and sound installation venue and residency program open to experimental art projects. She has presented solo programs, both acoustic and electro-acoustic with laptops or electronics throughout Europe and the US over the past three decades. A few examples of her sound installations and constructed instruments are: the Tentacled Bellows, a foot powered drone machine that combines the principles of an organ and bagpipe (built as a portable armourlike, houselike structure); a large installation Circular Bowed and Teetering Plucked featuring electronically manipulated mechanical structures; Ice-on-a-Wire an installation with plucked string and shifting pitch caused by melting ice. She has also created original sound scores, sound installations as well as musical compositions for many choreographers. In the mid 2000’s she returned her music focus to a detailed exploration, analysis and understanding of bassoon multiphonics, the details of which she has made freely available on her website. It is through this exploration of multiphonics and the subtle changes made when playing with resonance keys that she was brought to the multiple-mic project of a CD, “drop by drop, suddenly” released on XI label in September 2018.

Keijaun Thomas (New York, b. 1989) creates work in performance, installation, and poetry that explores the labor of black femmes in situations ranging from housework and hairdressing to athletic training and exotic dancing. Her performances combine rhapsodic layers of live and recorded voice, and her poems slip between various modes of address, exploring the pleasures and pressures of dependency, care, and support. Thomas underscores the endurance and intimacy care work demands of those expected to perform it—predominantly black women, black femmes and people of color.

Lauren Tosswill (Portland, ME) is an interdisciplinary artist, performer, and improviser currently living in Portland, Maine. She holds a BFA from Maine College of Art. Since 2014, Lauren has explored live improvisation using sound, speech, and movement. Lauren’s performance work relies heavily on improvisation as a method to access feelings, fixations, and memories contained in the body and the subconscious. She has given dozens of solo performances across the Eastern Seaboard. Her debut album of experimental recordings, “my home in the year,” was released in 2018 on the label enmossed. Her sound work has also been included in exhibits at the Portland Museum of Art in Portland, ME as well as the ICA in Richmond, VA.

Instagram: @lauren_teas_well