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Austin360 blogs > Austin Arts: Seeing Things > Archives > 2009 > March > 09
Monday, March 9, 2009
Sound art tours to augment The Domain shopping center
“Recreating The Domain” looks like it could be one of the more brilliantly clever independent public art projects to launch in Austin recently — a free, non-evasive creative and critical exploration of our changing urban landscape.
Organized and curated by sound artist Alex Keller, “Recreating the Domain” will feature artist-created recorded walking tours of The Domain, the North Austin shopping center/residence/office park. Any one will be able to download the walking tours and attend the exhibition on their own time, making “Recreating the Domain” a permanent exhibition.
The project will unveil on April 17 at which point the audio tours will be able to be downloaded from www.recreatingthedomain.org. The show is a featured exhibition in the Church of the Friendly Ghost’s Modern Aural Sculpture Symposium South.
Artists and their projects for “Recreating the Domain” are:
- Vanessa Rossetto, with a sonic analysis of the historical use of land currently known as the Domain.
- James Patrick Robinson, with a sound collage of life and work in the Domain that dissects where corporate culture meets our daily lives.
- Christopher Petkus, with an audio tour that maps the steady disintegration of the tour guide.
- Brent Fariss, with a piece designed to challenge the listener to re-contextualize his environment through interaction.
- Bill Bridges, with a piece that deals with corporate speech, translation, and mistranslation.
In Keller’s own words he explains:
“Our roster represent a cross-section of Austin’s best and brightest media artists, each with an unique perspective on the Domain and how it works in Austin: as a part of the city’s tradition, or as a visitor, or as an employee.
“Recreating the Domain was not designed to create a forum just for complaints about the Domain. I’m interested in the Domain for a number of reasons, and not all of them are negative. Mixed-use architecture is really positive, as is the minimal carbon footprint of an outdoor shopping area.
“However, as someone who is interested in our cultural relationship with the real world of sound, the Domain’s employment of speakers playing fuzak in the middle of a ‘neighborhood’ really offends me. I’m not a huge fan of steep tax exemptions for luxury shopping, either. Obviously, there’s a lot of data to interpret, and I do think that the artists we’ve selected will do it right.
“This show is not officially sanctioned (or officially discouraged) by the Domain. However, since the show will consist of self-guided tours that will be freely downloadable to iPods, the Domain’s consent is not necessary. Anyone will be able to conduct their own tour at any given time, and the exhibition will run for as long as people are attending.”
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Review: Tapestry Dance Company’s ‘Head to Toe’
Tapestry Dance Company shows always exceed categories. Ranging from tap to modern dance to jazz, the company is, as artistic director Acia Gray describes it, a “multi-form company.”
Sunday’s “Head to Toe” performance at the Long Center marks the company’s first incursion into one of Austin’s newest dance spaces, and the packed audience got a little bit of all the forms and approaches Tapestry employs.
The show featured twenty different numbers, mainly choreographed by Gray and guest collaborator and local dancer and teacher Erica Santiago.
In solos, Gray and Santiago built portraits of individual personalities, and then later duets drew individuals together. In Jason Janas’s “Feeling Found,” Katelyn Thompson and Janas flirted with each other and Al Green’s music, looking like a pair finding the sweet spot of couple-dom where hips and shoulders sway in synchronous motion. Clarity and simplicity also guided dancer Matt Shields’ choreography for Tapestry’s newest (and welcome) additions, Siobhan Cook and Tony Merriwether.
Improvisation continues to birth some of Tapestry’s most eloquent work. In an improvisation to Gnarls Barkley’s “Searching,” Janas managed to grieve with his body, sending echoes of pain flying with every foot stomp.
As Janas painted an aural landscape of trauma, a single chair became the focus of his anger, until he crashed into it, overcome. In other solos, like Santiago’s “To Feel” for Thompson, chairs were less character and more prop. From television to modern dance, the emotive, often earnest or angsty “chair dance” is a well-traveled road. But the use of chairs as a recurring prop helped give the multi-faceted show a thru-line.
Clare Croft is an American-Statesman freelance dance critic.
