New music/sound + film/video collaborations by:
Dominique Leone + Brenda Contreras
Kyle Bruckmann + John Slattery
Gino Robair + Bryan Boyce
with film scores performed live by the Eyes’nEars House Band:
Cory Wright, reeds
Kyle Bruckmann, oboe
John Shiurba, guitar
Dominique Leone, keyboard
Jason Hoopes, bass
Gino Robair, percussion/electronics
Jordan Glenn, drums
Mission Eye & Ear is a live cinema series that brings together Bay Area composers and improvisers with filmmakers and video artists drawn from ATA’s diverse and geographically sprawling family, to create new works performed live at ATA by a stellar ensemble of local musicians. Composer-performers Dominique Leone, Kyle Bruckmann and Gino Robair represent a rich cross-section of the local creative music scene, influenced by electronic music, acoustic improv, noise, avant-garde jazz, alt-rock and contemporary classical music. Filmmaker/media artists Brenda Contreras, John Slattery and Bryan Boyce explore political commentary, documentary storytelling, dreamlike cinescapes and formal abstraction in a wide range of narrative and experimental works.
This June event is the second in a series of three Mission Eye & Ear events this year, organized by Bay Area musician and curator Lisa Mezzacappa with ATA. The first edition of Mission Eye & Ear, in 2011, commissioned nine composer-filmmaker teams to create new works. The series was remounted in a day-long marathon at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in 2012, and has since traveled to cities in Italy and Germany, where local musicians provide live scores for films commissioned for the series.
Visit: www.missioneyeear.com
Mission Eye & Ear is supported by a grant from the Zellerbach Family Foundation.
Artist bios
Bryan Boyce, San Francisco based artist works primarily with film, video and still photography. Many of his projects reduce, recycle and re-use footage from a wide spectrum of sources to create hybrid critiques of politics and pop culture.
Oboist and composer/performer Kyle Bruckmann‘s work extends from a classical foundation into genre-bending gray areas encompassing free jazz, electro-acoustics and postpunk rock. His notated works, thus far written primarily for sfSound and his Chicago-based ensemble Wrack (recipient of a 2012 Chamber Music America New Jazz Works commission), are explicitly designed to maximize the interaction and creative engagement of improvising performers. His extensive performance credits and appearances on more than 50 recordings have led to his recognition as “a modern day renaissance musician” (Dusted) and “an excellent composer, striking the right balance between form and freedom” (Signal to Noise).
Brenda Contreras is a film programmer and visual artist working with 16mm, archival film, and digital video. Specifically, her interests lie in exploring and bringing light to human rights, feminist issues, and the marginalized. Contreras received her formal training at San Francisco State University. She continued her exploration of the experimental film community as an intern for Canyon Cinema, the festival director for the Mission Underground Film Festival in 2009, and as the co-director of the Cut +Run Film Tour, which lasted 3 years and toured the United States and Europe. Contreras has since volunteered with various microcinemas including Artists’ Television Access, LA Filmforum, & the Echo Park Film Center and worked alongside the programming team at Ambulante, a traveling film festival based in Mexico City. She currently lives in New York City and is working on her own short films.
Dominique Leone is a vocalist, keyboardist, bandleader and composer based in San Francisco. Leone writes avant-pop music inspired by sources as diverse as contemproary classical music, the avant-garde and progressive rock. He has released music on the Important and Smalltown Supersound labels, and his remix of Steve Reich’s “2×5” was released by Nonesuch. Dominique has worked with Matmos, Fred Frith, Hans-Peter Lindstrom and many others.
Gino Robair has created music for dance, theater, radio, television, silent film, and gamelan orchestra, and his works have been performed throughout North America, Europe, and Japan. He was composer in residence with the California Shakespeare Festival for five seasons and served as music director for the CBS animated series The Twisted Tales of Felix the Cat. His commercial work includes themes for the MTV and Comedy Central cable networks. His opera, I, Norton, based on the life of Norton I, Emperor of the United States, has been performed throughout North America and Europe. Robair is also one of the “25 innovative percussionists” included in the book Percussion Profiles (SoundWorld, 2001). He has recorded with Tom Waits, Anthony Braxton, Terry Riley, Lou Harrison, John Butcher, Derek Bailey, Peter Kowald, Otomo Yoshihide, the ROVA Saxophone Quartet, and Eugene Chadbourne, among many others.
John Slattery holds an MFA from the Department of Film and Digital Media at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). His first feature , Casablanca Mon Amour (recently featured in the New York Times) had its world premiere at the Dubai International Film Festival, he is generally interested in exploring the space between fiction and non fiction.
