For Immediate Release
March/April 2003
List under Visual Art/Exhibitions
and Special Events
Contact: Laura Brun at The LAB (415) 864-8855/lbrun@thelab.org
The LAB, 2948 16th Street, San Francisco, CA 94103
The LAB Presents
Coloring Sounds: Songlines for Seibert’s Pipes
Art exhibition by Josefa Vaughan
What: exhibition by Josefa Vaughan, Coloring Sounds: Songlines for Seibert’s Pipes
When: Friday, March 28–Saturday, April 26
Opening Reception: Friday, March 28, 7-9 PM
Gallery hours: Wednesdays-Saturdays, 1-6 PM
How much: April 3 and 10 salon events $5-$10 sliding scale admission; all other times free
Where: The LAB, 2948 16th Street @ Capp, San Francisco
For information call (415) 864-8855
San Francisco Artist’s Exhibit Revives the art of Continuation and Honors Her Grandfather, Builder of World’s Largest Pipe Organ
Mission District artist Josefa Vaughan, long a believer that art is for all people, is reviving an often forgotten art form called “continuation work” to demonstrate that art can truly be an aggregate endeavor via her new exhibition titled Coloring Sounds: Songlines for Seibert’s Pipes. The exhibition at The LAB opens March 28 and benefits ArtSeed, a charitable arts education organization connecting disadvantaged youth to artists, educators and professional resources.
The exhibition’s title refers to Vaughan’s grandfather Seibert Losh who, between 1929 and 1932, designed and built the Atlantic City Boardwalk Convention Hall organ, which, to this day remains the largest instrument in the world.
Continuation work, says Vaughan, “is artists’ material or actual art that is surrendered to a second artist for its completion – in this era of intellectual property law and copyright infringement suits it is difficult to imagine such an arrangement. We tend to view an artist’s vision as unique and singular. However, the practice of successive input occurred often in medieval Europe and was given a new twist in Robert Rauschenberg’s 1953 Erased de Kooning Drawing.” In developing the exhibition, Vaughan has been asking artists to give her their “abandoned meanders,” a geography term denoting beds left empty by winding rivers when they find more direct flows. “Artwork, ignored for too long, is often destroyed; but curiously, despite the taboo against displaying them, a good number of these unresolved efforts survive,” says Vaughan. Vaughan has also been inviting others – artist and composer friends, students, passersby at a bus stop – to draw on her abandoned meanders (mostly early figure studies). “Forsaken imagery is redeemed by a juxtaposition of impulses. Seemingly irrelevant exercises are transposed into curiously provocative dialogs,” maintains Vaughan.
Pipe Organs and Pipe Dreams
As a point of departure, viewers of the exhibition are asked to reference sounds or tube-like shapes associated with the anatomy of pipe organs. Says Vaughan, “these simple acoustical chambers (the most easily drawn illusionist image) are metaphors for fantastic ideas – pipe dreams, if you will; some people consider organs to be precursors of modern-day sound synthesizers, perhaps even forerunners to most common audiovisual instruments including computers whose complexities and versatility fascinate artists and technologists alike.” Vaughan references historic crossover experiments between color and sound such as Mary Hallock Greenwalt’s 1927 Light-Color Play Console, which had keys to supply “starlight and moonlight.”
RELATED EVENTS
Opening reception: Friday, March 28, 7-9 PM
Closing reception: Saturday, April 26, 7-9 PM
Black tie, thread bares optional. Continuous programming, come for all or part of both these evenings! At various points in the evenings hand held illumination will be used to view the art. These flashlight performances during the exhibition opening and closing receptions will highlight the gregarious process by which the work developed. During these silent jam sessions the audience directs the gaze and illuminates the art.
Panel discussion: Thursday April 3, 2003, 8-9 PM
From Hand to Hand: Continuation Process as Radical & Playful Pipeline
This lively panel event will explore the roots of current controversies over boundaries in a variety of fields such as art history, music, synaesthesia, sound technology, ventriloquism, and intellectual property rights. Panelists include David Hegarty, organist; Raymond Holbert, professor of art, design and related technologies at City College of San Francisco; composer Richard Felciano; synesthetic visual artist Jeanne Foss; writer and composer Charles Shere; and Meredith Tromble, visiting letters and science faculty at the San Francisco Art Institute. Doors open at 6pm. Come early to make continuation art or view and hear the installation!
Performance Event: Thursday, April 10, 2003, 6-9 PM
Flash! (Continuation Pipe Dreams)
This performance will feature compositions responding to or “continuing” individual art works or exhibition themes and will include music by William Klinglehoffer, co-principal French horn for the San Francisco Opera Orchestra, Kinji Hayashi, Butoh performance artist, Laetitia Sonami, performer and inventor of unusual electronic contraptions, plus composers Charles Boone, Christopher Burns and Beau Casey. During intermission the audience will use flashlights to view the art and hear an instrument devised by composer Alden Jenks, director of the electronic and recording studios at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. Please BRING FLASHLIGHTS! Continuous programming. Come for all or part of this evening!
PHOTOS AVAILABLE UPON REQUEST
ABOUT ARTSEED
ArtSeed is a grassroots nonprofit enterprise that has grown out of Vaughan’s innovative art making and teaching practices. ArtSeed artists work with various individuals and organizations to develop interdisciplinary arts projects while providing long-term vocational guidance to the young or disadvantaged. Its mission is to invite people of all ages and backgrounds to grasp, utilize and transform the arts through programs that include collaborative workshops, exhibitions, field trips, commissions, and private art lessons. Behind-the-scenes “Housecalls” to homes, schools and work environments culminate in festive “Shebangs” and on-going “Grapevines” referrals through the website, www.artseed.org and the Directory of Resources for Artists and Youth. ArtSeed partners with other professions and arts groups of all kinds (both experimental and traditional). By fostering shared creativity, critical thinking and peaceful self-expression ArtSeed aims to expand the meaning of art, enrich families and cross-fertilize the potential of people from diverse communities.
ABOUT THE LAB
Founded in 1984, The LAB is an interdisciplinary artists’ organization that supports the development and presentation of new visual, performing, media and literary art. We assist artists in the creation of new work and we present new work of the highest quality by emerging and established experimental artists. Of interest is work that crosses boundaries—material, cultural or presentational—and encourages new artistic and social dialogue between artists and audiences.
The LAB, a project of The art re grüp, Inc., is supported in part by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation; Meet The Composer, Inc.; The LEF Foundation; The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts; National Endowment for the Arts; California Arts Council, a state agency; the San Francisco Publicity and Advertising Fund’s Hotel Tax/Grants for the Arts program; the Haas Foundation’s Creative Work Fund; The British Council; Arts Council of England; Zellerbach Family Fund; Digidesign, Inc.; and members of The LAB. Special support for Josefa Vaughan’s project is provided by a grant from the San Francisco Arts Commission’s Equity Grants Program.