Bain Project Holds Forth Downtown
The Bain Project artists and supporters put together a huge bash on Martin Street and raised awareness of and funds for this fascinating and rapidly developing project. Ten artists, joined by three documenters, are transforming an abandoned historic Art Decco structure on South Wilmington, and making some great individual art along the way. Many of the individual responses were on display Saturday at 313 West Martin Street, a space provided by Clearscapes. The transformation of the 1940 water treatment plant will be on display the middle two weekends in May.
subscape annex
The big draw this weekend was the marathon music session, helpfully bannered at New Raleigh, which eventually drew a large evening crowd. The early afternoon acts were experimental and sparsely attended, but a truly amazing event took place at 4 PM. Benito Crawford, on the left below, devised and conducted a performance where the audience participated through a net interface. Crawford is a doctoral student in music at Duke, and the piece performed Saturday is part of his dissertation.
It was fantastic watching numerous people in the crowd getting their laptops ready, logging on to the website, and then offering their input into the outputs of the musicians and the synthesizers.
Bain artist Stacey Kirby readies her PC
musicians and audience collaborate
The evening music drew much larger crowds, but being generationally impaired, I spent most of my evening visit out in the front room with the Bain artists, who were rotating duties at the door, selling t-shirts and networking. There were small heavily layered iconic pieces from Marty Baird and Lee Moore, traditional oils from project leader Daniel Kelly, reflective collages on graph paper from Sarah Powers, a photo montage from Lia Newman, a piece of mail art from Stacey Kirby, and much more.
This project has picked up critical mass and velocity, and that was made clear on Saturday. Lots of energy, lots of fascinating work, and now a ground-breaking presentation of music in downtown. Go Bain!!
Grimanesa Amoros
This in my inbox – an international art fair to “give visibility to the Caribbean art world.” Participant Grimanesa Amoros was a resident artist at Artspace several years ago. She was making paper then, for a wonderful kind of seaweed documentary I will get back to sometime, but she really does whatever in the world she needs to do in order to create art in the most fantastic and sometimes unlikely venues. The one below was visible each day to certain New York City commuters, from the MTA Metro North platform, as well as people walking the Harlem streets below. Commisioned by real estate developer Eugene Giscombe for the Lee Building at 125th Street and Park Avenue, the installation was inspired by “his passionate interest in exotic, wild animals, and Harlem itself.” Check out the video to get a better idea.
The installation was created by projecting colored lights in a deliberate, looped sequence, controlled by a computer onto rear projection screens covering large windows. Over-sized silhouettes of animals made of foamboard, painted black create moving shadows in the windows. The sequence begins just before sunset and ends just before sunrise. The lighting controller calculates these astronomical events based on the location of New York City (40° 46’N x 73° 58’W) and its five time zone west difference from Greenwich /Mean Time.
June 3 – June 8, 2008
Both 205
Uferstrasse 80
CH-4057 Basel, Switzerland
raleighrambles.com
portrait by Guillermo Velasco
Raleigh Rambles 