NYC
Wordless Wednesday: Vertical (MoMA Sculpture Garden)
Wordless Wednesday: Long Island City
Snow Leopards and Stone Cats from the Bronx Zoo
We begin our articles from my recent trip to New York with a special Weekend Cat Blogging featuring some of the cats I encountered at the Bronx Zoo.
Greeting visitors who arrive at the original Fordham Road entrance are two stone cat sculptures.
While these sculptures have a very contemporary look about them, they actually date back to 1920s. They are the work of famed sculptor Anna Hyatt Huntington, who donated them to the zoo in 1937, where they have remained on the stairs between Astor Court and the entrance fountain ever since. You can read more about her work with the Bronx Zoo here.
This was a short and very directed visit, focusing on a few specific animals, and especially those with recent offspring. Among those where this adorable snow-leopard cub.
It’s hard not to fall for the cuteness of these cubs. The other one was fast asleep a few feet away.
Mama snow leopard was sleeping nearby as well.
In the next enclosure, we met the proud papa, Leo.
Leo was rescued as an orphaned cub after being found in the mountains of northern Pakistan, and has served as “an ambassador for Pakistan at the zoo since 2006” (read more here).
The Bronx Zoo, along with the neighboring New York Botanical Garden and the large Bronx Park that contains both institutions, is a gem of a borough that gets an unfair rap. We will have more from the Bronx, including art and photography, in upcoming articles.
Wordless Wednesday: Purple High Line
Wordless Wednesday: High Line Ghosts
2013, The Transformative Year
[click image to enlarge]
Once again, it’s time for our traditional end-of-the-year image at CatSynth. The past couple of years have all been good, rich, full, and sometimes complicated. But 2013 has been particularly significant, certainly one that I will long remember. As the title says, it has been a transformational time on multiple dimensions for me, indeed it has touched almost every aspect of my being. There will be more to say on that in the coming days. Music and art have been going very well, too, and one of the main challenges of this coming year will be to build on the successes of this past year but in a more directed way. If that sounds vague, it’s because I haven’t quite figured it out yet.
For Luna, things pretty much are the way the always are. Such is the life of a contented house cat. And we wouldn’t have it any other way.
Thanks to everyone who reads and supports this project, whether here at the blog, on Facebook, or through the many personal friendships that grown from here. You are all what makes this work worthwhile!
Performance at Harvestworks with Rachel Mason and The Use
Today we look at the second of my two performances in New York this past November. This one took place at Harvestworks, a non-profit organization in lower Manhattan that supports musicians and helps them work with technology. It was also a bit of a homecoming for me, as I had interned at Harvestworks in the summer of 1993 – yes, 20 years ago!
The concert was actually part of artist-in-residence Rachel Mason’s ongoing work, and featured a collaborative performance with Michael Durek of The Use that exploited Harvestworks’ surround-sound system. The piece included a mixture of videos, both found online and created specifically by Mason, and live music that featured electronics from Durek and voice by Mason. You can see their full performance in this video.
Rachel Mason and Michael Durek, Harvestworks, November 30, 2013 from CatSynth; on Vimeo.
It opens with a found video of an odd fellow talking about using electro-magnetism to detect ghosts. He explains basic electronics to the video (at one point getting his units wrong), with Durek slowly entering with discrete tones on the theremin. Soon the texture becomes thicker and moves into more beat-based music that I have heard in The Use’s more recent work. Rachel Mason’s vocals were quite expressive and melodic. The videos changed to show Mason in interesting costumes walking around both Brooklyn and Joshua Tree, two particular favorite environments of mine.
Then it was time for me to take the stage. I also used video, a very simple live-processing patch in Jitter that combined generated images with live input. For this piece, I had a set of cat-themed playing cards, which I would draw, show via the video processing, and then interpret for the next section of music, either as a literal specification for a patch on the Dave Smith Evolver, or more abstractly with the analog modular synth and Garrahand drum. You can see the full performance in the following video.
Amar Chaudhary at Harvestworks, November 30, 2013 from CatSynth; on Vimeo.
Overall, it was a great show, and we managed to have a full house, which is always a nice experience as a performer. I certainly hope to be able to work with these artists and with Harvestworks again in the future.
Chelsea Galleries, December 2013
My visits to New York almost always include an afternoon wandering the galleries in the Chelsea neighborhood. And I was able to get back again this year and see how the neighborhood had rebounded from Sandy last year. The area was hit hard with flooding, and last November many galleries were closed, while others were physically open as crews removed drywall and ran industrial fans. There was little outward evidence of the damage this year, save for a musty aroma in a couple of galleries. Thus, the focus was on the art itself.
The major event in the neighborhood appeared to be Yayoi Kusama’s solo exhibition at David Zwirner. The large exhibition including both paintings by Kusama as well as several installations. A large video installation Manhattan Suicide Addict featured the artist with bright red hair and outfit greeting visitors in front of changing psychedelic patterns. Nearby was a visually captivating immersive installation Love Is Calling featuring light, sound, sculpture and mirrors. The experience within the space was disorienting, but not at all disturbing with the large softly curving forms and cool colors.
Because of the limited space inside, access to the installation was limited. However, there was no line for Love Is Calling when I visited, while the wait for Infinity Mirrored Room – The Souls of Millions of Light Years Away, 2013 was several hours long. There was no wait at all to see Kusama’s paintings, which while equally loud, had more of a cartoonish or folk-art quality to them compared to the overt technological nature of the installations.
A surprise discovery was Piece of Silence, an exhibition of new drawings, paintings and sculptures by Sandra Cinto at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery. Among the major themes in her show was music, and indeed the entire lower gallery featured a series of elaborately illustrated cellos and other musical instruments mounted onto walls covered in musical staff systems. The illustrations featured elaborate naturalistic landscapes and water, themes that were also used into Cinto’s other sections of the exhibition. As the gallery was not too crowded, it was possible to linger in the stark gallery and take in the “silence.”
We then go from something unexpected to something completely as expected. There wasn’t much surprise in Richard Serra’s monumental sculptures at Gagosian Gallery’s two Chelsea locations, but they are nonetheless favorites of mine for the scale, metal texture and industrial quality. (I have heard is work derided as macho in the past, but that is a topic for another day.) At the 21st Street location, there was a single installation made from huge undulating sheets of rusting metal. One could walk through and explore the interior spaces, which ranged from round chambers to narrow passageways.
The pieces at the 24th Street, by contrast, were very linear in nature. I did particularly like this set of rectangular slabs.
Michel de Broin’s sculptures at bitforms featured industrial elements, but on a human scale and constructed from existing utilitarian (or formerly utilitarian) objects. Tires, utility boxes, broken light bulbs, are all fair game in de Broin’s work, which is arranged quite minimally and efficiently around the gallery’s space. There is also a playful quality to these pieces.
Found machinery and industrial objects are also the essential elements of Hidden Tracks, a solo exhibition by Reinhard Mucha at Luhring Augustine. The large pieces in the exhibition included working elements such as model railroads and old TV screens playing videos of similar industrial apocrypha.
In reflection, the industrial and the technological dominated the art that I focused on during this particular tour. But that is not surprising. It also was a major part of Michael Light’s photography exhibition at Danziger Gallery. The show focused on human technology set against the natural landscapes of the western United States, as seen from the air. That included several images of large freeway interchanges, including some classics from California and Arizona that we have included in our “Fun with Highways” series here at CatSynth.
As always, my Chelsea gallery walk ended with a visit to The Red Cat for a Manhattan and some samples from their menu. This time, that included a season soup with sausage confit that was highly recommended by my server and definitely worth enjoying slowly between sips of the cocktail and reflecting the days activities.
