Microscope is very pleased an evening of live music, sound, and video featuring the electronic sounds of Matt Wellins, video by MV Carbon, and a sound performance by the new band by Rachael Guma and Sarah Halpern Invisible Scissors.
New Haven-based artist Matt Wellins kicks off the night with a set of new electronic sound involving electromagnetic transducers emitting signals through small hi-fi speakers. The performance marks the debut of new hand-built instruments by the artist created with materials largely sourced and repurposed from trash.
The recently formed duo Invisible Scissors features treated theremin and electric guitar/voice by Rachael Guma and Sarah Halpern respectively. Although the two artists have collaborated frequently in the past in various forms and mediums, this event is the first public performance of the new project which formed in December 2022.
In between the two sound sets, a program of short videos by MV Carbon — “Eye of the Epidemic” (2020), “The Passing” (2020), and “The Pillow” (2019) — will screen.
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MV CARBON is a multidisciplinary artist focusing on media manipulation, sound morphology, and the transformative interrelationship between sound, image, space, and place. carbon’s music unravels lucid abstractions, weaving dreams into tangibility. Carbon forms soundtracks with amplified objects, voice, electric cello, magnetic tape, oscillators, keyboards, and field recordings, addressing psychological feedback through poetry, music, and performance. sculptural objects function as musical instruments, amplifying the ritual, rhythm, and momentum embedded in music. carbon taps into the mystery of the human mechanism, exploring themes such as interchangeability, regeneration, and the transmogrification of mind and matter.
RACHAEL GUMA is a light and sound artist who works with liquid light projection, Super 8 film, Theremin, turn-table manipulations, live Foley, collage, and stop motion animation. She has collaborated with Optipus Film Collective since 2009, and co-founded the liquid light projection group, A Clockface Orange, with Genevieve H.K. She has performed at AXWFF, Anthology Film Archives, Ambient Church, Echo Park Film Center, Das Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Index Festival, The Kitchen, Long Island Children's Museum, Museum of the Moving Image (MOMI), Microscope Gallery, Mono No Aware, Morbid Anatomy Museum, Museum of Art and Design (MAD), Northern Flickers, Orphans Symposium, Participant Gallery, Paul Klee Museum, Planet Money Live, RX Gallery, Roulette Intermedium, San Francisco Cinematheque, Transient Visions, UnionDocs, Unseen Cinema, and the Whitney Museum of American Art (in alphabetical order).
SARAH HALPERN works with light, voice, performance, text, electric guitar, paper, and installation. Her work has been presented at institutions including Anthology Film Archives, Experimental Intermedia, The Kitchen, The New York Film Festival (NYFF) Views of the Avant-Garde, The Museum of Moving Image (MoMI), The Whitney Museum of American Art (Dreamlands Expanded) and the Centre Pompidou among others. She is a a founding member of the expanded cinema collective Optipus and a MacDowell Colony Fellow.
MATT WELLINS lives in New Haven, CT. His work, initially based in analog circuitry, is more broadly focused on the snafus of live performance, general ambivalence toward commercial equipment, and miniaturization. This work has been fueled by long-term research into the private loft theater of 1970s New York, cybernetic systems in the work of Gordon Mumma and Roland Kayn, and the ZBS Artist-in-Residency program. He has released music on What the...? Records and presented work at Anthology Film Archives (with Sarah Halpern) and the Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center in Troy, NY, among other venues.