Artists' Television Access

Collaborations: “Smashism” A night of experimental video, film and music. Odd colors, digital experiments, swirling chemistry, disintegrating media, dissonant moments in mundane places and textural tones will collide.

Tuesday, July 17, 2012, 8:00 pm, $6

Video works by Andrew Benson, Black Hole Cinema, Kamau Amu Patton and Suzy Poling.
Performances by: bran(…)pos, Ryan Jewell and Lea Bertucci.

Bio
Andrew Benson is a visual artist and performer based in San Francisco, working primarily with digital and electronic media. His performances, videos, animations, and Net Art works are rooted in a materialistic and playful approach to electronic media – exploring the digital form as both a visual language and a specific material. Playing at the edges of animation, experimental video, and electronic sound, Andrew combines unusual processes with a saturated and complex visual style.  He has recently collaborated with Joshua Churchill, M.I.A., Aphex Twin, is a part of the ongoing Plink Flojd A/V project with Yoshi Sodeoka, and regularly contributes animations to Sheroes, a monthly event in Toronto recently featured on Rhizome.org.  He is an active, innovative member of the Live Visuals community, has been teaching electronic media courses at SFAI since 2008 and is a long-time contributor of educational content for Cycling ’74 Software.

Tooth runs Black Hole Cinema, that is a film collective based in West Oakland that screens historic, sublime, experimental and documentary film and video from all over the world on 8mm, 16mm and digital formats. “tooth is a bay area based artist, insomniac, and perceptual activist, who often makes moving image works concerned with the properties of light and air, and their occasional interaction with organic and inorganic material. he enjoys long walks, the destruction of objective reality and how cigarette smoke looks in front of a projector beam”

Kamau Amu Patton is an artist based in New York and San Francisco. He received his MFA from Stanford University in 2007 and is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania with a degree in Sociology. Patton has exhibited his work in solo exhibitions at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts and Queens Nails Annex in San Francisco, Machine Project in Los Angeles and Tilton Gallery in New York. He has worked collaboratively on artists’ projects at MOMA in New York and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Patton was a 2010-2011 A.I.R. at The Studio Museum in Harlem. Patton is one of 4 artists selected for the SFMOMA’s 2010 SECA Art Award. His work will be featured in an exhibition that will open at the museum in the fall of 2011.

Pod Blotz/Suzy Poling makes photographs, films, videos, collage, light art installations, mirror sculpture, silkscreened work, performance art and experimental music. Poling is from Michigan, was schooled in Chicago and is now based in Oakland, California. She has presented specific multi-dimensional performances with refractive sculptures, video and sound at the Berkeley Art Museum, Machine Projects, Cal Poly University, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco Electronic Music Festival, 23five Incorporated, The Lab, Queen’s Nails Projects, Southern Exposure, San Jose Museum of Art, Transmodern Festival and Portland Institute of Art. Pod Blotz has also played in various warehouses and clubs throughout the US and in Europe and has played other festivals such as No Fun, Colour Out of Space, INC and Neon Marshmellow Fest. Pod Blotz’s audio work is aural version of an extensive body of visual work and research. Overall, Poling is concerned with
hypnotic realms, natural phenomenon, ecological oddities, the systemized order of space and comprehensions of entropy.

bran(…)pos is the ongoing audio-visual-performance-noise-musique-brain-bend of Jake Rodriguez from San Francisco, CA.  Rodriguez has been performing and recording under this moniker for 15 years with releases on C.I.P., Resipiscent, Ratskin Records, Animal Disguise, and Chitah! Chitah! Soundcrack.  synthesizer and mouth manipulations are the most common audio elements,  rounded out with rubber face and a live video component to complete the human-analog-digital-human circle.  in March 2011, two bran(…)pos releases were on display at the Editions of You fair in Oxford, UK and added to the Oxford Brookes University Popular Music Research Unit’s permanent collection of hand-made editions and zines.  more info, sounds, photo, video can be found at soundcrack.net.  “With a background in theater performance and sound (and a seriously demented mind), Rodriguez with his bran(…)pos project has boiled down the most absurd elements of our ongoing ritual into an amalgamation of human, sound, and light that is at once ridiculous and terrifying.”

Lea Bertucci is an interdisciplinary artist who works with Photography, Sound, Video and Installation. She received her BA in Photography from Bard College in 2007, the same year she was awarded a fellowship from the Tierney Foundation. The emphasis of her work lies in exciting the liminal areas of perception. She uses tactics such as slide projection, stop motion video and lo-fi filtering of sound to engage with these ideas. In 2009 she was awarded a residency from Smack Mellon and a Jerome Foundation Young Composer’s Commission from Roulette. In 2012, she was selected as an artist in residence at Roulette. She has performed solo and collaborative works at venues such as Issue Project Room, The Kitchen, Anthology Film Archives, St. Marks Ontological-Hysteric Theater, free103point9, Galapagos Artspace, The Queens Museum of Art and the High Zero Festival. She is currently based in the high deserts of Southern Utah.

From his current home base in Columbus Ohio; musician, sound artist, composer and improviser, Ryan Jewell has been relentlessly pursuing the limits of percussion in both his solo and collaborative work. With his deft hands, Jewell is capable of conjuring a variety of sonic vocabularies out of an ever-evolving collection of acoustic and electronic implements. Often with little more than a snare drum and a handful of common, household objects, Jewell weaves unbelievably intricate and profoundly textural aural tapestries ranging from smooth drones and high pitched screeches, to low rumbles and metallic scrapes. His work combines the sparse and the frantic, the experimental and the technical.

His often understated and focused style is both educated and intuitive having been developed through both traditional training and street-level practice. Jewell studied percussion and electronic composition techniques at Capital University and has since studied drum set with Susie Ibarra and tabla with Dr. Lowell Lybarger and Jim Feist. He has continued to hone his unique voice touring extensively throughout the United States, Europe, New Zealand, and Australia collaborating with artists like Greg Kelley, C. Spencer Yeh, Nate Wooley, Christine Sehnaoui, Bhob Rainey, Jandek, Mike Shiflet, Aaron Dilloway, Envenomist, Larry Marotta, Vic Rawlings, Fossils, Rafael Toral, Psychedelic Horseshit, Pink Reason, Jason Zeh, Wasteland Jazz Unit, and Pete Swanson along with others. Additionally, his work has been showcased at international festivals such as the SOWIESO 1 and Les Sciences Bruitistes festivals in Paris, the International Noise Conference in Miami, SXSW in Austin, Neon Marshmallow in Chicago and the Kraak Festival in Brussels.