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UNSEEN series | Broken Solar/City of God

Gray Area’s UNSEEN Series presents site-specific, collaborative performances by Bay Area artists and explores current practices in immersive media, including expanded cinema, video and sound art, experimental music and technology. The UNSEEN series is curated by Oakland artist Matt Fisher.

Tickets: $8 Presale / $13 Day of Show / $15 Door. Cash bar available to those 21 years and older.

Schedule:
8:00 Doors
9:00 Show

Oakland based artist Chris Duncan will create a live score for the debut of BROKEN SOLAR, a new film by Headlands Center for the Arts Spring 2016 artist in residence Sarah Rara. BROKEN SOLAR is a meditation on natural resources, human-built environments, and the aesthetics of renewable energy. BROKEN SOLAR studies photo-voltaic surfaces, converting light into energy using the waste from solar installation as material, the video-in-progress makes use of discarded pieces of broken solar cells, reconstituting and recombining solar fragments into warped formations. The bones of a blue whale (solar-powered, taking it’s energy from the sun via phytoplankton and krill) makes an appearance and shimmering sheets of mylar, acting as stand-ins for waves of light, weave throughout the video. For the score, Duncan will respond to the film with a combination of field recordings made on the Northern California coast line and processed tones generated from tuning forks and harmonicas.

Then guitarist Sean Smith will present a program of long form composition and improvisation featuring original music and video by his project, LFZ as well as the first ever completely live interpretation of "...city of god" a a composition for tape loops and live guitar solo by the legendary Northern California duo, Science Fiction, whose extremely rare 1980 private press LP has just been reissued on Smith's imprint, Stimulus Progression. Science Fiction privately released only two discs circa 1980 so rare to become the stuff of legend. Here's some words taken from Mutant Sounds about their LP, Terrible Lizards: “This is as eerily prescient and vibe-rich a document of sub-underground weirdity as you're likely to encounter for some time.”

Artists

Chris Duncan

Chris Duncan is an Oakland-based artist who employs repetition and accumulation as a basis for experiments in visual and sound based media. Often in flux between maximal and minimal, Duncan's work is a constant balancing act of positive or negative, loud or quite, solitary or participatory and tends to lead towards questions regarding perception, experience and transcendence. Outside of his studio practice he organizes events and runs a small artist book press and record label called LAND AND SEA with his wife. Duncan earned his BFA from the California College of Arts and Crafts and his Masters Degree in Art Practice from Stanford University.  Under the moniker OFFING, Duncan creates open ended sound paintings rooted in the accumulation of simple tones made from tuning forks and harmonicas combined with field recordings of natural phenomena. Duncan has performed and exhibited nationally and internationally at galleries, project spaces, living rooms and museums.  

Sarah Rara

Sarah Rara is a Los Angeles-based artist working with video, performance, and installation who recently completed the spring residency at Headlands Center for the Arts. She is opftent known as one of the members of Lucky Dragons. Her recent work focuses on human-technology relationships and the tension between human-built environments and wild ecologies. Sound-image relationships in particular are integral to her work. Sound, with direct correlation to social themes of harmony and dissonance, forms an ideal platform for translating and exploring modes of cooperation and individualization, as well the multiple forms of attention built into any viewing (or living) scenario.

Sean Smith

Rooted firmly in solo acoustic composition, Smith has – over the past creatively fruitful decade – adopted electric instruments and devices to further his search and study. Improvisation is now an equal component to composition in his work. LFZ is Smith’s current musical endeavor. Guitar is at the heart and synthesizers come into play at times, all manipulated by a vast array of analog and digital devices. The music is emotionally driven and rides the line between composition and improvisation. There is a deep experimentalism captured in the music of LFZ – all executed by tangible means. LFZ is exploratory of sights, sounds and the phenomenological. Smith is also the owner and operator of the record label, Stimulus Progression.