With video works by Robert Buck, Abigail Child, Keren Cytter, Ray Sweeten & Lisa Gwilliam (DataSpaceTime), Benton C Bainbridge, Dante Lentz, Gryphon Rue, Taietzel Ticalos, B. Wurtz
Microscope is very pleased to present a screening of video works made in response to Gryphon Rue’s album “A Spirit Appears to a Pair of Lovers” released earlier this year.
All of the 10 tracks of the album are interpreted by an intergenerational group of video artists/filmmakers: Robert Buck, Abigail Child, Keren Cytter, Ray Sweeten & Lisa Gwilliam (DataSpaceTime), Benton C Bainbridge, Dante Lentz, Gryphon Rue, Taietzel Ticalos, and B. Wurtz.
The in-person event involves multi-speaker immersive by Rue. The artist remarks that “the videos are integral to the identity of the album and reflect the highly visual nature of the music.”
The music for A Spirit Appears to a Pair of Lovers is available on Bandcamp at: https://gryphonrue.bandcamp.com/album/a-spirit-appears-to-a-pair-of-lovers
Rue as well as several of the visual artists will be in attendance.
Please note: masks are required at this time for in-person events at the gallery.
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Gryphon Rue (b. New York, NY) is an artist, composer, and musician. Rue’s music, constructed of complex patterns derived from singing saw, harmonium, and custom synthesizers, discloses a fascination with mimetic potential—the ability to suggest biological actions, molecular events, possession, nourishment—and is above all, made with people’s pleasure in mind. The album A Spirit Appears to a Pair of Lovers (Not Not Fun) features percussionist Mustafa Khaliq Ahmed (Arthur Russell, LOLO), with ten videos made by intergenerational collaborators. Rue is a recipient of a Roulette 2022-2023 Commission, made possible with funds provided by the Jerome Foundation.
Other releases include Foliage of Caves (Soap Library), North of The Future with Merche Blasco (Astral Editions), Resounding: North of The Future (Tiger Sushi), and Love is a Grasshopper Nearby as Vertical Foliage (CAMP Editions).
Rue performs in the light and sound duo Rue Bainbridge, and hosts Earmark, a program of long form conversations with composers and sound artists on Montez Press Radio.
Videos are distributed by The Film-Makers’ Cooperative, and collaborations with Robert Buck via Electronic Arts Intermix.
Rue's artist book Strange Attractor (Inventory Press & Ballroom Marfa) explores the uncertainties and poetics of networks, environmental events, and sound. Among its many contributors are Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Channa Horwitz, Bernadette Mayer, Haroon Mirza, Beatrice Gibson, Lucky Dragons, and Merlin Sheldrake.
In 2021 Rue organized exhibitions and performances at D R O N E, a project space in Tribeca (drone1hudson.com); curated the launch of author Matt Marble’s Buddhist Bubblegum: Esotericism in the Creative Process of Arthur Russell with a performance by Russell’s group Singing Tractors; as well as Clayton Patterson: Beauty Mark, a monumental photomontage/window exhibition for Printed Matter.
Rue has performed and lectured internationally at venues such as de Young Museum, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, The Hepworth Wakefield, Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, The Shigeko Kubota Foundation, Hauser & Wirth, Pace Gallery, Roulette Mixology Festival, New Media Art & Sound Summit, Take Off Festival, Festival Hongerige Wolf, i = u Festival, Kathy Acker Awards. Rue is a recipient of a Roulette 2022-2023 Commission, made possible with funds provided by the Jerome Foundation.
Benton C Bainbridge handcrafts media art with custom image processing systems.
"Benton fingerpaints with video.” – Trilby Schreiber
Bainbridge has shown at Whitney Museum, Lincoln Center, Museum of Arts & Design, Museum of the Moving Image, American Museum of Natural History, The Kitchen, EMPAC, SFMoMA, Boston Cyberarts Festival, l’Auditori, Fundación Juan March, Auditorium Parco della Musica, Sonic Light, Wien Moderne, Teatro Colón CETC, Korean Festival, and Dak’art.
Current projects include Rue Bainbridge, the first recipient of the Nam June Paik and Shigeko Kubota Video Art prize, with recent shows at de Young Museum, Pace Gallery, The Hepworth Wakefield Museum, and Hauser & Wirth.
Bainbridge is faculty at SVA MFA Computer Arts. Artist-in-Residence at Andrew Freedman Home, Bainbridge exhibited video sculptures and moving paintings with Beauteous: the AFH / Museum of Modern Art immersive spectacle written by Craig "muMs" Grant. For Miami Art Week 2022, Benton is presenting Lonely ROCKS, a decentralized exhibition of self-portraits at Untitled Art.
Keren Cytter creates films, performances, drawings and photographs on topics of social alienation, language representation, and the function of individuals in predetermined cultural systems through experimental modes of storytelling and human perception. Selected solo exhibitions include: Ludwig Forum Aachen (2022) Kunstmuseum Winterthur (2020), Center for Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv and Museion Bolzano (both in 2019) Künstlerhaus - Halle für Kunst & Medien, Graz (2016) Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (2015) and the Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen State of Concept, Athens (both in 2014,) Tate Modern Oil Tanks, London (2012,) Cytter is the Cytter was awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship in 2021.
Born 1948 in Pasadena, California, B. Wurtz is best known for his playful and compelling sculptures constructed from discarded materials like produce packaging, construction lumber, and plastic bags. Wurtz’s repurposing of everyday flotsam into joyous, humorous, and beautiful objects undermine grand artistic gesture while elevating the commonplace. The artist’s transformative amalgams of found materials have tended to coalesce around the subjects of “sleeping, eating, and keeping warm”—the foundational human needs named in his 1973 drawing Three Important Things. While his sculptures are often modest in scale, in 2018, the artist created his now iconic Kitchen Trees for the New York City Public Art Fund, transforming City Hall Park with towering columns of colorful colanders exploding with plastic fruit.
Wurtz has been the subject of over 52 solo exhibitions at prestigious venues including: Feature Inc. (1987, 1991, 1992, 2001, 2003, 2006, New York); Gallery 400 (2000, Chicago); White Flag Projects (2012, St. Louis); Kunstverein (2015, Freiburg, Germany); and the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, (2015, Ridgefield, Connecticut). In 2015, the BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, United Kingdom mounted a retrospective exhibition of the artist’s work that traveled to La Casa Encendida, Madrid through 2016. In 2018, the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles mounted a major solo exhibition of his work, This Has No Name.
His work has also been included in over 174 group exhibitions including: Pandora’s Box: Joseph Cornell Unlocks the MCA Collection (2011, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago); Building Blocks: Contemporary Works from the Collection (2011, Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence); and Brand New: Art and Commodity in the 1980s (2018, Hirshhorn Museum, Washington D.C.)
Dante Lentz: I am a painter / video/ performance artist who makes real-time generative performances captured to video. Wearing a webcam and painting with contact microphones as audio/sensors I interact in real-time with the conceptual program while capturing the digital experience to video. Playing with common forms of experiencing media and drawing attention to the distance and manipulation that are inherent in them. My previous works have utilized Facial Recognition, Motion Detection, and 3D Modeling.
Taietzel Ticalos (b. 1986) is a visual artist based in Bucharest, Romania. Her artistic practice investigates the transmutation of reality into the virtual space and contemplates the development of digital narrations. She focuses on sexual objectification, social media as consumer media, digital performance and digital reenactment. Since 2019 she manages together with Gabriela Mateescu the digital art platform spam-index.com.
Lisa Gwilliam & Ray Sweeten (DataSpaceTime) made their debut as the collaborative duo in 2011 with the solo exhibit “the optimal value for y” at Microscope Gallery. They use digital and analog technologies that are further developed or redirected utilizing the artists’ original software to consider the culture of informatics and the thresholds of image recognition and perception across various mediums. Their work has been featured in institutional shows in the US and abroad including the solo exhibition “Cryptophasia” at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) and in the group shows “Processed: To Each Their Own Image”, Centre Pompidou, Paris, France; “Day In Day Out” at GEH8 Kunstraum und Ateliers, Dresden, Germany “Altarations”, Schmidt Center Gallery, Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton, Florida, and “Dialogics”, Rowan University Art Gallery, New Jersey among others. Their 6-channel video “Breakout” was commissioned by The Parrish Museum for New York City Center.
Robert Buck is a cross-disciplinary artist recognized for his precise use of materials, ranging from traditional art supplies to such non-art materials as mortician’s wax, industrial reflective paint, latent fingerprint powder and gunpowder. In 1995, Beck (as he was then named) was awarded a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, in Printmaking/Drawing/Artists’ Books, as well as an Art Matters, Inc. grant. He received a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award in 1999. In 2007, Beck had a solo exhibition at the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, OH. In 2008, Beck changed his given, or father’s, name as a work of art by a single vowel to Buck. His work is included in museum and private collections internationally. In 2019, Buck received a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Award. His moving image works are distributed by Electronic Arts Intermix, New York. His visual art is represented by Ulterior Gallery, New York. His show, Wound Filler, opens later this month at Von Ammon Co., Washington, D.C. Buck lives and works in NYC and far West Texas.
Abigail Child has been at the forefront of experimental media and writing since the 1980s, having completed more than fifty film/video works and installations, and written 6 books. An acknowledged pioneer in montage, Child addresses the interplay between sound and image, to make, in the words of LA Weekly: “brilliant exciting work…a vibrant political filmmaking that’s attentive to form.” For Gryphon Rue’s music, I respond with landscape, which during the Covid crisis was both a source of promise and surprisingly, a refreshing indifference to the stupidity and rapacity of our anthropocene culture.