SUBMERSION Oakland

SUBMERSION Oakland

WHO

Gench and Cilla Vee Life Arts – with Cilla Vee, Thomas Dimuzio, Kit Young, Lori Varga, Aurora Josephson, Chandra Shukla.

WHAT

Submersion – an immersive, multi-media environment of sound, image and motion

WHEN

Saturday October 13^th – 9pm – 12 midnight

WHERE

Pro Arts – 150 Frank H Ogawa Plaza, Oakland CA 94612

HOW MUCH

Sliding scale $7 - $15

Gench and Cilla Vee Life Arts present:

SUBMERSION

Definition:

Immersion. Hiding. Beneath the surface. Completely absorbed by / involved in.

Differential Topology.  Differentiable Manifolds. Soft Question.

Performance:

An immersive, multi-media environment of sound, image and motion.

The everyday world melts away as though wandering deep into a forest or ocean.

Everything changes.

Time. Space. Temperature.

The psyche surrenders.

Transcendence.

SUBMERSION is a durational performance installation during which the audience is free to come and go throughout. 

ARTIST INFORMATION

Cilla Vee Life Arts

CILLA VEE LIFE ARTS is an inter-disciplinary arts organization founded in 2002 in the South Bronx by Claire Elizabeth Barratt (aka Cilla Vee) – now based in Asheville NC.
It serves as an umbrella for multiple projects that focus on collaboration and facilitation. With a mission of blurring boundaries and crossing categories, CVLA draws from a diverse pool of artists with a wide range of artistic backgrounds.
Performances can include anything from dance, movement, music, sound, text, film and video, visual and performance art to installation and beyond.

“When it's summer in the city, people do weird things. Performers especially. ....“Beguiling”
John Rockwell – New York Times

Cilla Vee Life Arts - http://www.cillavee.com/

Gench - http://www.gench.com/

This Fall Cilla Vee is touring cross country and the west coast in order to connect and collaborate with area artists in each location.

Cilla Vee - http://cebhomepage.blogspot.com/

Thomas Dimuzio - http://www.thomasdimuzio.com/

Kit Young - http://www.youngkit.com/

Lori Varga - https://grayarea.org/community-entry/lori-varga/

Aurora Josephson - https://www.aurorajosephson.net/

Chandra Shukla - http://xambuca.com/

Cilla Vee 

 

Claire Elizabeth Barratt (aka Cilla Vee) is an inter-disciplinary artist with a performing arts background. She is the director of Cilla Vee Life Arts  – an arts organization with a focus on cross-media collaboration.

Her work utilizes artistic disciplines of dance, music, text, media, visual and installation art.

Claire has presented her work in venues as diverse as Jacob’s Pillow , the New York

Botanical Gardens , Black Mountain College Museum + Art Center  and Art Basel Miami. She has performed and taught throughout the USA, Canada, Europe, Japan and Pakistan.

Claire received her professional training in London at The Laban Centre For Movement and Dance  and at the London Studio Centre For Performing Arts . Her pre-professional training includes the Royal Academy of Dance  and the Royal Schools of Music  examinations. She also served an apprenticeship with the Isadora Duncan Dance Foundation  in New York and holds an MFA in Creative Practice  from the Transart Institute  with Plymouth University, UK.

On moving to the USA in 1992, Claire held the positions of Dancer for Unto These Hills  drama on the Cherokee Indian Reservation and for Asheville Contemporary Dance Theater  in North Carolina, as well as serving as a Co-Founder and Director for Circle Modern Dance  and as Choreographer for the Knoxville Opera Company  in Tennessee.

Once based in New York in 2002, Claire founded Cilla Vee Life Arts  and, with the support of arts advocates such as Chashama , Bronx Council on the Arts  and Arts for Art , began to develop and present her signature modes of work – including Motion Sculpture Movement Installations  and The Sound Of Movement  projects.

She is the creator of the Living Art pedagogy for performance art.

Claire now uses Asheville NC as her home-base.

“My work as an artist blurs boundaries and crosses categories. Re-defining the traditional concepts of a “piece” and challenging the conventions of performance, time, space and audience relationships.”

Thomas Dimuzio

THOMAS DIMUZIO is a musician, composer, sound designer, mastering engineer, label proprietor, and music technologist residing in San Francisco, California. Inspired by John Cage and with roots firmly planted in Led Zeppelin, Dimuzio combines sound with the power of music into sonic excursions that transport the listener into other worldly aural realms. “His work has a narrative, filmic tug that will draw you into its dark corners, ears alert… brilliant and rarely less than entertaining.” —Peter Marsh, BBC

Long regarded as a musical pioneer for his innovative use of live sampling and looping techniques, Dimuzio has earned a deserved reputation worldwide as an avant-garde sound artist in touch with the aesthetic pulse of time and technology. A true sonic alchemist who can seemingly create music events out of almost anything, Dimuzio's listed sound sources on his various releases include everything from 'modified 10 speed bicycle' and 'resonating water pipe' to short-wave radios, loops, feedback, samplers, synthesizers and even normal instruments such as guitar, clarinet and trumpet. Dimuzio's eclecticism bespeaks a career equally informed by a profound dedication to his craft and collaborations with friends, artists and technologists alike.

“Attending a Thomas Dimuzio performance is like lying underneath a web of freeway bridges with your eyes closed; blocking out all visuals except the brief daggers of light that flicker with each passing car. There is a sense of probable dread—metal, wooden or cigarette debris from the vehicles could fly off and injure you—but also one of hypnotized calm, thanks to the amplified hum of Michelin and Goodyear against greased concrete.” —Cameron MacDonald, Pitchfork Media

Dimuzio's recordings have been released internationally by ReR Megacorp, Asphodel, RRRecords, No Fun Productions, Sonoris, Drone Records, Record Label Records, Odd Size, Seeland, and other independent labels. Among his collaborators are Chris Cutler, Dan Burke, Joseph Hammer, Anla Courtis, Nick Didkovsky, Due Process, Voice of Eye, Fred Frith, David Lee Myers, 5uu's, ISIS, Matmos, Wobbly and Negativland.

Kit Young

  

Kit is an artist who produces video embedded sculpture, video art, and performance art. His studio is in a store front space on San Pablo Ave. in Oakland, CA.

In recent years he has been building video art systems that are flexible enough to be played in an improvisational way. He performs collaboratively with other sound and visual artists at venues that host expanded cinema events. He also conducts live experimental sessions in his studio, the results of which become video shorts. Though his work utilizes new media technique, his practice is grounded in the experimental cinema thematic traditions of perception, awareness, and humor.

He has exhibited and performed nationally and internationally. Recent screenings or performances have taken place at the Montreal Underground Film Festival, (Canada); Transient Visions Festival of the Moving Image, (Johnson City N.Y.); The Berkeley Video and Film Festival, (Berkeley, CA.); the Experimental Film Festival, (Middlesbrough, England); and Crossroads Film Festival, (San Francisco, CA.).

Lori Varga

Lori Varga is a veteran Bay Area analog film & Light projection Artist. Utilizing forgotten / near obsolete technology into optically challenging psychedelic light shows & multi-projector visual displays- as her main form of expression. Lori has been hand-making 16mm multi projector film collages & audio collages since 1994. Delving deep into the world of culture jamming and experimental media work from an early age, she has made visual art as her mantra for the last 28 years.

Alongside various tech work for experimental light shows , Lori has made over 15 short experimental /collage essay films in super 8mm & 16mm format. From 1999 till 2010, she projected analog/background films & hand- painted film loops for well-known touring psychedelic rock/avant-garde bands throughout Texas and US Mid-West. Her performance work has been shown often in venues & theaters such as The Cinematex as Film Festival, Craig Baldwin’s Other Cinema, Salvage Vanguard Theater, Shapeshifter’s Cinema, Blanton History Museum, Berkeley’s BAMPFA museum Analog Light Show Festival, The Lab (SF) , Filmhuis Cavia Film Fest Amsterdam ,New Orleans Media festival 2003 & small Micro cinemas all over the world. Usually she works solo, with a large, expansive table of analog projection units (slide projectors/ timers/16mm film projectors/ Analyst units/ modified stage gear)- currently she is branching out to incorporate digital projection units & camera systems into her live setups. Alongside working with experimental and found film footage/ educational imagery she also creates music using vintage cassette recorders, offbeat & satire – like samples, various , awkward ,circuit -bent sound instruments and 1950’s reel to reel tape decks. Recent Past Collaborations have been with well -known Bay Area film and sound artists: Kit Young, Thomas Dimuzio, Tom Djll, Richard Reed, Sarah Brady, & John Davis.

Lori has produced huge film installations and radically challenging display systems for music acts such as The Butthole Surfers, St37, Book of Shadows, Legendary Pink Dots & Austin's Noise x No Wave Music Fest. Also previously played Moog THEREMIN for the Austin Theremonic Orchestra project.

Overall, this unstoppable woman is an extreme multimedia collaborator & curator.  She savors live, immersive work with Improvisational and Experimental Electronic musicians.

Aurora Josephson

Aurora Josephson is a musician and visual artist who currently resides in Oakland, California. Building on the foundation of operatic training and a BA and an MFA in Music Performance from Mills College, she has forged a bold vocal style that is uniquely her own. To unleash the limitless range of sonic possibilities in the voice, Josephson employs a variety of extended and unconventional techniques drawn from the worlds of contemporary composition, improvisation, and rock. Current projects include Headlights with Derek Gedalecia(Headboggle) on electronics & keyboards, and Tainted Pussy with Sharkiface on electronics and Katerina Kopelevich on keyboards. She has performed and recorded with Alvin Curran, Gianni Gebbia, Henry Kaiser, Joelle Leandre and William Winant, and musical groups Big City Orchestrae, Flying Luttenbachers, The Molecules, ROVA Saxophone Quartet, T.D. Skatchitband and the Merce Cunningham Dance Company.

Derek Gedalchia

Derek Gedalecia, a.k.a. Headboggle, has been performing electronic keyboard-based soundscapes for several years in the Bay Area in over a hundred local performances at venues ranging from GTK to YBCA. Incorporating lowbrow with highbrow art, music, and comedy, Head Boggle’s intent is to fuse together a new ecstatic improvisational performance style with a carefully crafted musical underbed. In his formative years, Gedalecia studied classical and ragtime piano from noted ragtime composer/revivalist Dr. Brian Dykstra.

Chandra Shukla will be replacing Derek. Welcome Chandra!