From Our Artists: Recent Projects Online

By Rayna Holmes, Administrative & Development Associate

 

In an effort to support our artists during this moment in which concerts, exhibitions, album releases, book launches, and other events are cancelled or postponed due to the COVID-19 pandemic, The Kitchen is compiling weekly selections of projects that you can engage with from home. Each week, we’ll highlight a Kitchen artist’s recent work—a new album, book, zine, essay, online exhibition, etc.—on our channels. 

To receive these features in your feeds, follow us on Instagram or Facebook. A complete list of all featured artists is aggregated below. Check back regularly to see our latest feature!


AUGUST 22 – New record from Amirtha Kidambi and Lea Bertucci

Released June 5th digitally and pressed to cassette, Kidambi and Bertucci’s latest collaborative release builds on past live performances—such as The Kitchen’s stage in January 2019—and their debut record of the same year.

“The arrival of Amirtha Kidambi and Lea Bertucci’s “End of Softness EP” finds us in a vastly different world, a mere six months after the release of their debut “Phase Eclipse” (2019). Working remotely in isolation, Bertucci and Kidambi engaged in a process of creative editing, lifting fragments from the Phase Eclipse sessions and a live performance, to re-contextualize the music amidst a pandemic. The crisis lends a new expression of agony to the torrential caterwauls of Kidambi’s voice, passed through Bertucci’s unforgiving God-play at the tape machine. With the blunt concision and brevity of punk songs, the tracks imply a sonic riot, instilling a subconscious urge to break the windows of your nearest financial institution.”

To purchase or stream the album, click here.


AUGUST 15 — new radio show from C. Spencer Yeh

On Friday, August 14, Kitchen artist C. Spencer Yeh kicked off a new weekly radio show LIVING ON THE AIR on KPISS FM. The show is on every Friday from 3–4pm EST, and its description gives a sense of what you can expect to hear: “the movie of your life meets the sound of my voice.”

LIVING ON THE AIR marks Spencer’s return to a weekly radio show, after years since his last one as part of WNUR 89.3. The artist has described his time with WNUR as extremely formative and defining for his future activities, so it will be exciting to see what this new show brings about!


To learn more about the show, click here.


Artist’s History with The Kitchen: Spencer has been involved in several Kitchen events over the past years, most recently performing via livestream for Kitchen Broadcast on May 12, 2020.


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AUGUST 9 — Black Dance Stories featuring Raja Kelly Feather and nora chipaumire (story sharing and discussion series)

With a team consisting of Charmaine Warren, Kimani Fowlin, Nicholas Hall, Cynthia Tate, and Gabe Dekoladenu, Black Dance Stories features dancers and choreographers who use their work to raise societal issues, strengthen community through their programming, and use history as a source of inspiration.  

This month the story sharing and discussion series brings together Sydnie Mosley and 2017–18 Kitchen artist Raja Feather Kelly (Aug 13) in discussion; as well as Zane Booker, Oluwadamilare “Dare” Ayorinde, Leslie Parker, and 2005 Kitchen artist Wanjiru Kamuyu in subsequent weeks. 

The series, streaming live every Thursday in August at 6pm EDT, will also present the world premiere video of another Kitchen artist, nora chipaumire’s, new work—”[another ] township manifesto” (Aug 27)--created specifically for the digital platform in response to our current world environment where Black artists are finding innovative ways to continue to address the politics of Black bodies and connect to their audiences. 

 To stay up-to-date on the events in this series, follow @blackdancestories or sign up for their mailing list.


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AUGUST 1 — M. Lamar Live (new live EP from M. Lamar)

Released early July, M. Lamar Live is a high quality live recording of three pieces from “Funeral Doom Spiritual,” M. Lamar’s 2017 collaboration with HunterHunt-Hendrix. Joined by Anagram String Trio led by James Silgenfritz, this new layered instrumentation “evokes a deep mourning and a profound resurrection where the living and the new undead can stand together against the rot of the world.”

M. Lamar is a composer who works across opera, metal, performance, video, sculpture and installation to craft sprawling narratives of radical becomings. Lamar’s work has been presented internationally in London, Berlin, Copenhagen, Sweden, Prague, and most recently in New York at The Cloisters at The Metropolitan Museum Of Art, Issue Project Room, Participant Inc., Cathedral of Saint John the Divine, Performance Space, among others. Lamar continues to study classical and bel canto technique with Ira Siff, and is a recipient of a number of awards and grants, including a 2016 Jerome Fund Grant for New Music (JFund), a 2016 NYFA Fellowship in Music and Sound.

To purchase M. Lamar Live or other releases by Lamar, click here.

Artist’s History with The Kitchen: M. Lamar last performed at The Kitchen in 2016 with his presentation of The Demon Rising, a new composition (for male soprano, piano, and projections) is in part inspired by the grand jury testimony of Darren Wilson (the white police officer who murdered unarmed black teenager Michael Brown.) The Demon Rising embraces and incarnates white fantasies of blackness as oversized, superhuman, a supernatural menace. At the same time, it charts the black subject's psychic and mythic odyssey from dehumanizing rituals of death toward a self-made re-membering. To learn more about this performance, click here.


JULY 26 — passing-time.org (artist-driven online video channel)

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Launched last month, passing-time.org is an artist-driven online video channel with no commercial or institutional affiliation. Initiated by Alex Perweiler, Neville Wakefield, and 2014 Kitchen artist Cecilia Bengolea when California became the first state in the US to order lockdown, Passing-Time functions as a collective, anonymized, living artwork that captures the times we times ourselves in.

Like time itself, Passing-Time does not offer a stop, pause, fast-forward or rewind button. Instead, the work presented is algorithmically randomized as well as anonymized–a collective index stands in place of individual attribution. Each time the website is visited, different sequences and juxtapositions yield different meanings. A live document, new work is continually added to the Passing-Time channel, with those invited acting as both curators and contributors. Over 100 artists have contributed so far, including past Kitchen collaborators Alex Hubbard, Haley Mellin, Olivia Erlanger, Ari Marcopoulos, and many more.

https://www.passing-time.org/


JULY 19 — Viola Yeşiltaç: beyinbeyin / brainbrain in Hear, Here (new sound work)

Last month, Cooper Gallery at University of Dundee launched A space in-between #3: Hear, Here, commissioning artists Anne Bean and Nicol Parkinson, Anne-Marie Copestake, Tina Krekels, Georgina Starr, and Viola Yeşiltaç to make new sound works accompanied by texts or images in response to the cacophony of this ongoing moment.

Wading into rivers, feet clicking on pavements, looking out the window, alone in dark rooms, and ignoring the loudspeakers, every sound in here is a clamour, drawing attention to the vivid immediacy of where we are, with each other and with the world in all its concrete particularity.

Traveling as an observer and displaced by errant mother tongues, Yeşiltaç’s new piece beyinbeyin / brainbrain strains the limits of what we hear between the borders. In her “here,” with adroit attention to detail, a vaster world takes shape, ephemeral and fleeting, it gives notice on what was normal, on what was contained.

To listen to the sound works in this series, click here.

Artist's History with The Kitchen: Through her work, Viola Yeşiltaç reflects intensively on the idiosyncrasies of places in her conceptually-driven works, which she does in a diverse range of media. She last collaborated with The Kitchen in 2015, showing work in the group exhibition no entrance, no exit, curated by Lumi Tan and featuring additional works by Anna K.E. and Alina Tenser.


JULY 11 — Moyra Davey: Index Cards (new book)

Released this May via New Directions Publishing, Index Cards is an essential selection of photographer and filmmaker Moyra Davey’s sly, surprising, and brilliant essays. While thinking and writing, she weaves together disparate writers and artists—Mary Wollstonecraft, Jean Genet, Virginia Woolf, Janet Malcolm, Chantal Akerman, and Roland Barthes, among many others—in a way that is both elliptical and direct, clear headed and personal, prismatic and self-examining, layering narratives to reveal the thorny but nourishing relationship between art and life.

“The art world has long known that Moyra Davey is one of the most interesting, challenging, and sincere contemporary writers. Now others will know it too.” — writer Chris Kraus on Index Cards

To purchase Davey's new book, click here.

Artist’s History with The Kitchen: Moyra Davey is an American photographer, filmmaker, and writer who first collaborated with The Kitchen as a participant in our 2017 Benefit Art Auction.


JULY 5 — Christopher K. Ho: Recent artworks now on view

Now though the fall, Christopher K. Ho presents two works as part of in-person group shows abroad. Ho is a speculative artist based in New York, Hong Kong, and Colorado. Ho recently had solo shows at Tomorrow Maybe (Hong Kong), Brooklyn Academy of Music, and the Bronx Museum, and his practice encompasses making, organizing, writing, and teaching. He is known for crafting materially exquisite objects that draw equally from learned material about—and lived encounters with—power and otherness in an unevenly de-colonialized, increasingly networked world.

Two of Ho’s recent works now stand on view digitally and in-person at Asia Society Hong Kong and Beijing’s UCCA Center for Contemporary Art. As part of Asia Society’s Next Act: Contemporary Art From Hong Kong, Ho presents a new work Stop Eating While You're Still a Little Hungry, which consists of a miniature model theatre based on the theatre in which US President Lincoln was assassinated. Intricate patterns printed directly onto the brass miniature are at once euphoric and hysteric, celebratory and unsettling, and they allude to the underside of nationalist spectacle that, like autostereograms, can function as decoys.

Included in UCCA’s Meditations in An Emergency, Ho’s 2018 installation piece CX 888 considers borders and themes of travel. The screens respectively blink Cathay Pacific airline’s signature teal and maroon in dactylic hexameter, the poetic meter used in The Odyssey while deck chairs adjusted to the recline of 1980s business class seats line a carpeted aisle.

To learn more about Ho’s work, click here. To view Asia Society Hong Kong’s exhibition, click here. To explore UCCA’s exhibition, click here.

Artist’s History with The Kitchen: Christopher K. Ho is a multidisciplinary artist, writer, and teacher who first collaborated with The Kitchen by participating in our LAB series in December 2018. To watch the discussion in full, click here.


MAY 24 — Marguerite Hemmings and Erick Boustead: INNRSPCE: Finding Live On Earth (visual album)

On May 14, 2020, Marguerite Hemmings and Erick Boustead premiered INNRSPCE: Finding Life On Earth, a visual album featuring four young dancers exploring fantasy as a means for survival. Combining the use of the body, camera, lighting, and space to tell a story from the inside out, INNRSPCE is an affirmation of the agency and imaginations of young movers to find ways to continue living (or to thrive) on this planet.

To watch a recording of the live premiere, along with the Q&A that followed, click here. To stay up to date on new episodes, follow @innrspce on Instagram, or visit their website here.

Artist’s History with The Kitchen: Marguerite Hemmings is a dancer and choreographer who first began collaborating with The Kitchen in 2018 by participating in our LAB series and presenting we free lab as part of The Racial Imaginary Institute: On Whiteness . Most recently, Hemmings performed as part of our 2019 collaboration with free jazz organization Arts for Art, IDENTITY: FREEDOMTo watch Hemmings’ performance in Dave Burrell’s ensemble premiere of Harlem Renaissance as part of IDENTITY: FREEDOM, click here.


MAY 23 — Patrick Higgins: Dossier (recent album)

Described by The New Yorker Magazine as one of the “prime movers of the local avant-garde,” and an “exacting avant-classical guitarist” by TimeOut New York, Higgins is a New York-based composer and performer of experimental music. His latest record—released on Nicolas Jaar’s label Other People in 2018—is Dossier, a solo record of guitar and live custom electronics with original programming and live sampling using MIDI triggers mapped to the guitar. The record is an engagement with contemporary electronic music and yet is entirely performed—transforming the guitar into both an instrument and a controller. “The work is also...a meditation on the social space of the individual in the increasingly digital, alienated world.”

To listen to or purchase the record, click here.

Artist’s History with The Kitchen: Patrick Higgins is a guitarist who has performed at The Kitchen as part of Nicolas Jaar’s label showcase Other People Presents Two Shows in 2017, and as part of Miho Hatori’s Salon Mondialité  in 2019.


MAY 17 — Helado Negro featuring Xenia Rubinos: “I Fell In Love” (new single)

On May 1, 2020, Helado Negro released a new single “I Fell In Love” featuring Xenia Rubinos. A recipient of the Joyce Foundation Award, Helado Negro is the music and performance work of Brooklyn-based artist Roberto Carlos Lange. Exploring the expressivity within intense states of being, Latinx identity, and pluralistic sensibilities, Lange’s music can be characterized as lyrically personal and political avant pop music.

“I Fell In Love” marks the first collaboration between Lange and Rubinos. The song premiered as part of Adult Swim’s 2019 Singles Program. While sharing the single, Lange stated “I want this song to be a sonic bridge for you to get from this moment to the next, solace in sonics, uplift on this music spaceship to your planet of peace. No condition is permanent, and tomorrow can be better.”

To listen to or purchase the new single, click here.

Artist’s History with The Kitchen: Helado Negro performed at The Kitchen in 2015, premiering works from his 2016 hit album Private Energy as part of our Synth Nights series.


MAY 16 — Down The Rabbit Hole: JB in JT: A James Benning exhibition arranged by Julie Ault and Martin Beck, in collaboration with O-Town House (online exhibition)

In partnership with Scott Cameron Weaver of O-Town House, Martin Beck and Julie Ault present Down The Rabbit Hole: JB in JT, an “exhibition at home” now on view online.

In honor of artist and filmmaker James Benning and the organizer’s friendship with him, Down the Rabbit Hole brings together the artworks and artifacts made by Benning that are distributed in Beck and Ault’s house and grounds in Joshua Tree. According to Weaver, “the works in Down The Rabbit Hole are listed in chronological order to highlight the unfolding of friendship over many years; the show becoming an extension of ongoing collaborations with a view toward the future... Moments of recollection, such as Down the Rabbit Hole represents, become crucial to finding fresh ways of thinking about the role art can play in the construction of community.”

To view this online exhibition, click here.

Artists’ Histories with The Kitchen: James Benning is an artist and filmmaker who presented a number of screenings at The Kitchen throughout the 1980s, including Pascal’s Lemma and contributions to our FILMWORKS and Video Viewing Room program series. Martin Beck is a video artist who first presented at The Kitchen in 2017 with the exhibition Last Night , featuring a film based on the 118 songs played by David Mancuso on June 2, 1984 at one of the last parties of the original location of his seminal NY dance party, the Loft.


MAY 10 — F Magazine issue 10: “REAL ESTATE” (digital and print magazine)

In April 2020, F Magazine released its 10th issue, “REAL ESTATE.” F is a bi-annual magazine published and edited by Adam Marnie. Past issues have explored themes including sexuality from awakening to oppression to liberation; the creation of the celebrity; and aestheticization and the age of the “image object.”

This latest edition includes contributions from a number of Kitchen artists/writers, including Andrianna Campbell-LaFleur, Liz Deschenes, Christopher K. Ho, Haley Mellin, John Miller, and Alan Ruiz, as well from other artists including Nick Angelo, Trudy Benson, Dawn Cerny, Vanessa Conte, Jenni Crain, DROOIDS, Russell Etchen, Peter Fend, Jen Fisher, Jamie Fletcher, Ryan Foerster, Thalia Forbes, Blair Hansen, Julie Hart, Miles Huston, Jeremy Jansen, Butt Johnson, Matt Kenny, Max Maslansky, MoneyGraham NYC, Phoebe Nesgos, NOWORK, Seymour Polatin, David Rimanelli, Alex Roth, Heather Rowe, Amanda Schmitt, Steel Stillman, Nickolaus Typaldos, and Kevin Zucker.

F issue 10 is risograph printed by Dan Schmahl in Galveston, TX and designed by Tuomas Korpijaakko. Pre-orders include a PDF version of the publication. Print orders will be mailed out mid-May. To pre-order “REAL ESTATE,” click here.

Artists’ Histories with The Kitchen: Haley Mellin is a visual artist who first collaborated with The Kitchen by donating a work to our 2014 Benefit Art Auction. She also was a contributor to Anicka Yi’s 2015 exhibition You Can Call Me F . Christopher K. Ho is a visual artist who participated in our L.A.B. series in December 2018, and writer Andrianna Campbell-LaFleur took part in the same series in April 2018. Liz Deschenes is a visual artist who was part of our three-month exhibition From Minimalism Into Algorithm in 2016 and participated in a L.A.B. discussion the same year. John Miller is a visual artist, critic, musician, and teacher who first presented at The Kitchen in 1983 with his solo exhibition Recent Work . Since then he has returned several times as a musician, including performances as part of XXX Macarena in 2009 and The Cornichons in 2010. Alan Ruiz is a multidisciplinary artist who first presented at The Kitchen as part of Whitney ISP’s 2018 exhibition, omnipresence .


MAY 9 — Steve Swell: Music For Six Musicians (album)

Born in Newark, NJ, trombonist and composer Steve Swell has been an active member of the NYC music community since 1975. He has toured and recorded with diverse jazz personalities from Lionel Hampton and Buddy Rich to Anthony Braxton and Cecil Taylor.

Music For Six Musicians, one of Swell’s more recent compositional works, is an homage to the late French composer Olivier Messiaen. Recorded live and released via Silkheart Records, the album features Rob Brown (saxophone), Jason Kao Hwang (violin & viola), Robert Boston (piano & organ), Tomas Ulrich (cello), and Jim Pugliese (drums & percussion). Swell’s latest solo record is The Loneliness of the Long Distance Improviser, a collection of solo improvisations now available on Bandcamp. Swell’s next highly-anticipated collaborative works, The Center Will Hold and Astonishments, are set to release later this fall and feature him alongside Andrew Cyrille, Jason Hwang, Dave Burrell, Jemeel Moondoc, and William Parker.

To listen to Music For Six Musicians, click here. To explore Swell’s entire discography, click here.

Artist’s History with The Kitchen: Steve Swell performed at The Kitchen as part of IDENTITY: FREEDOM , our 2019 collaboration with free jazz organization Arts for Art. This program presented free jazz ensembles in a multidisciplinary program of improvisation over the course of three evenings at The Kitchen.

To watch Swell’s performance in Dave Burrell’s ensemble premiere of “Harlem Renaissance,” click here.


MAY 3 — New Dance Alliance: Performance Mix Festival: Remotely Yours (digital festival)

Starting Monday, May 4, New Dance Alliance (NDA) will present the thirty-fourth annual Performance Mix Festival: Remotely Yours. Typically a live weeklong series of experimental dance and performance, the event takes shape this year as a reimagined, stay-at-home festival featuring thirty artists from May 4 through 31.

Each day of the month, NDA will spotlight a different artist on its website and social media platforms (and additionally will provide performance space and programmatic features once NDA reopens). Artists will have total creative control of their biography pages, allowing them to upload and present work in all artistic mediums (photos, videos, livestreams, crafts, etc.). The digital festival includes Anh Vo, Kameron Chatman, Nami Yamamoto, Diana Crum, and many more.

Follow NDA on Instagram @newdancealliance, or visit newdancealliance.org to follow along.

New Dance Alliance’s history with The Kitchen: Incorporated in 1989, NDA is an arts service organization whose mission is to actively promote emerging forms of innovative dance, music, video, and interdisciplinary performance. Its director Karen Bernard first performed at The Kitchen in 1996 as a Dance in Progress participant. Later, she presented Totally In Love (1995–2006) as part of a double bill with Trajal Harrell in 2006, curated by Tere O’Connor. Most recently, Bernard participated in Dance and Process in 2016.


MAY 2 — Yanyan Huang: “Cloud Tongues” (audio project)

Frequently working in painting and ceramics, Yanyan Huang combines references to traditions of European art, Chinese calligraphy, and contemporary abstract painting with mark-making both free and deliberate. Born 1988 in Sichuan, China, Huang is based between Beijing, New York, and California. Deriving influence from a wide span of cultures and time, she maps out in her work an elaborate array of temporal geographies, identities, and relationships.

Now in response to quarantine, Huang has embarked on a new audio project “Cloud Tongues,” a continuous series of readings from books and spoken poetry. With readings ranging from theory and Greek mythology to Latin prayers and 19th/20th century poetry, Huang finds home within the distance between speaker and listener. “I guess since I have been in isolation for months, it is a way for me to speak to someone, even if it’s just myself. Perhaps it will provide someone some comfort.”

To learn more about her “Cloud Tongues” project, click here.

Artist’s History with The Kitchen: Huang first collaborated with The Kitchen as a participant in our 2018 Benefit Auction. She describes her piece Cloud Poem, I, II—and her work more broadly—as “a collaborative process between my desires, my intuition, and my yearning toward my version of perfection. All these grapple for control over chaos and despair.”


APRIL 26 — Xeno & Oaklander: “Blue Flower Live in New York” (new single)

Xeno & Oaklander is a minimal electronics duo (Liz Wendelbo and Sean McBride) based in NYC. As artists, they have been deeply involved in the analog synth community for over fifteen years, and have helped promote the revival of synth wave in the US and globally through their extensive touring and prolific output. Last week in tribute to live electronic music, the duo released “Blue Flower live in New York” via Bandcamp. An-all time favorite of many, this track has had numerous lives throughout the duo’s career. First released in 2006 and re-released various times since then, “Blue Flower” continuously takes on new shapes as Wendelbo and McBride tour and perform unique, live synth sets around the world. This latest version comes from a live show at The Sultan Room last year.

To listen to “Blue Flower live in New York,” click here. To learn more about Xeno & Oaklander, visit their website here.

Artists’ Histories with The Kitchen: In 2014 Xeno & Oaklander performed their solo work as part of Synth Nights, an ongoing series highlighting new experiments in analog electronic music. Wendelbo also helped present The Kitchen’s Women’s Synth Workshop, a program co-hosted by Ghostly’s Molly Surno focused on inspiring women to learn about the technical aspects and ideas behind modular synthesis and experimental electronic music.


APRIL 25 — Tim Fain: RESILIENCE (weekly livestream)

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Tim Fain is an acclaimed violinist who most recently has been seen and heard in films such as Black Swan and Bee Season. A frequent Philip Glass collaborator, Fain is both a dynamic and compelling performer of traditional works and fervent champion of 20th and 21st century composers, with a repertoire ranging widely from Beethoven and Tchaikovsky to Aaron Jay Kernis and John Corigliano.

Each week of quarantine Fain has hosted “RESILIENCE,” a Facebook LIVE performance from his studio, Saturdays at 3pm EDT / 12pm PDT. This weekend’s fourth iteration features works by J.S. Bach, Glass, DJ Spooky, Missy Mazzoli, Sergei Rachmaninov, and Kevin Puts, as well as some of Fain’s own compositions and arrangements. In addition to his weekly performances, Fain has also released a new composition for violin in orchestra in honor of Earth Day 2020.

Click here to tune in to Fain’s weekly live performance on Facebook. And to learn more about his most recent release “Glacial,” click here.

Artist’s History with The Kitchen: In May 2015, Fain presented a special performance celebrating Orange Mountain Music’s release of the world-premiere recording of Partita for Solo Violin, a work written specifically for Fain by Glass. The Partita is the central work around which their worldwide and critically acclaimed duo performances are based, and is the centerpiece of Fain’s multimedia project “Portals.” To learn more, visit the event page here.


APRIL 18 — Qasim Naqvi: BETA (album)

Naqvi is a Pakistani-American avant-composer and drummer of the cult experimental acoustic trio Dawn of Midi. As a solo project, Naqvi is set to release Beta, a new modular synth album exclusively for US Record Store Day 2020 (now postponed to June 20). Beta is a prequel to the story of his highly praised release Teenages from last year and comprises a series of experiments chronicling Naqvi’s understanding of writing for modular synths and the growth of the instrument itself. 

Click here to listen to “Matic,” the latest single from the forthcoming album. To visit Naqvi’s website, click here.

Artist’s History with The Kitchen: Naqvi performed at The Kitchen as part of Dawn of Midi in February 2016. Dawn of Midi is a Brooklyn-based acoustic ensemble made up of Aakaash Israni from India on double bass, Amino Belyamani from Morocco on piano, and Naqvi on drums. The one-night only, sold-out performance celebrated their 2015 album Dysnomia (Erased Tapes) with a set that abandoned improvisation in favor of highly precise composition, utilizing sophisticated rhythmic structures from North and West African folk traditions to weave a sonic tapestry of trance-inducing groove. 


APRIL 11 — Caitlin MacBride: Useless Flowers (exhibition at Fisher Parrish Gallery) 

MacBride is a NYC-based artist whose paintings center around fragments, artifacts, and visual hierarchies as a way to intertwine distance, desire, and affective uses of paint. In her latest works, shown in a joint exhibition Useless Flowers with Sam Stewart at Fisher Parrish Gallery (closed early due to COVID-19), and a new essay “Washing Rituals” for Title Mag, MacBride mediates on such rituals over time through an exploration of the 1700s Shakers’ precise craftsmanship, utopian lifestyle, and community-oriented devotion to cleanliness. “There seems to be an act of caring not just for oneself but for one’s community in the act of washing. The motions and traditions of washing become like a prayer for safety—both in our personal lives and in our cultural belief systems, religious and scientific.” To learn more about the artist, visit her website.

Artist’s History with The Kitchen: MacBride first collaborated with The Kitchen as a participant in our 2017 Benefit Auction. Her piece Corner Of The Room came from a series of still life paintings of fabric draped in her studio. Created from careful observation, her lush depiction calls attention to the seams and folds of the material—pondering its transformation from two-dimensional textile to three-dimensional form. 


MARCH 19 — Ka BairdRespires (album)

Respires—Ka Baird’s second solo album, released in October 2019—blurs the line between word and action, definition and possibility. Spirited yet restrained, Respires was born from the intertwined etymologies of spirit and breath and features the results of Baird’s singular approach to extended vocal techniques and radical notions of “body music” that push her performances to uncompromising extremes. Channeling a raw energy from an internal depth, the genetics of Respires construct new bridges of communication, reaching across the perceptual boundaries of spiritual and physical. Largely written and recorded throughout 2018, the eight tracks align as a series of visceral actions, captured, culled, and intricately shaped by Baird and then expanded with contributions from Zach Rowden (bass), Max Eilbacher and Andy Fitzpatrick (synths), and Greg Fox (drums). Limited Edition Colored Vinyl and Digital Album both available via RVNG Intl. To learn more about Ka Baird visit her website.

Artist’s History with The Kitchen: Baird first performed at The Kitchen as part of Moriah Evans: Configure in December 2018.Vivification Exercises, a collaboration between Baird and Max Eilbacher, was scheduled as part of 2020 Winter/Spring season (the performance was postponed in response to COVID-19 pandemic). Baird will present a livestream performance as part of our Kitchen Broadcast series on Tuesday, April 28, 6pm EDT. 


Images: Thumbnail and 1) Amirtha Kidambi and Lea Bertucci, End Of Softness EP, album cover. Layout & artwork by Jaime Zuverza. 2) Courtesy of the artist. 3) Olivia Erlanger, 60 second clip from The Witness-Storm Chaser, 2017. Courtesy of the artist. 4) Graphic for A space in-between #3: Hear, Here, 2020, online programme presented by Cooper Gallery at University of Dundee. 5) Moyra Davey, book cover for Index Cards, 2020. 6) Christopher K. Ho, CX 888, 2018. Deck chairs, 2 single-channel videos, monitors, carpet, removed floor tiles, blank plane ticket, model airplane, Left video (green): 28’01”, Right video (red): 24’14”. Dimensions variable. 7) Marguerite Hemmings and Erick Boustead, video still from INNRSPCE trailer. Courtesy of the artists. 8) Nicolas Jaar, album cover for Patrick Higgins, Dossier, 2018. Courtesy of the artist. 9) Robert Beatty, album cover for Helado Negro and Xenia Rubinos, “I Fell In Love,” 2020. Courtesy of the artists. 10) James Benning, after Darger (Welcome), 2020. Acrylic paint on garage door, 6 feet 11 inches × 25 feet. Courtesy of the artists. 11) F Magazine issue #10: REAL ESTATE cover. 12) Steve Swell, Music For Six Musicians (album cover), 2017. Courtesy of the artist. 13) New Dance Alliance, poster for Performance Mix Festival #34, 2020. Courtesy of NDA. 14) Yanyan Huang, Cloud Poem I, II, 2018. Acrylic and ink on canvas, 20 x 32 inches. Courtesy of the artist. 15) Xeno & Oaklander, cover for “Blue Flower Live in New York,” 2020. Self-released. Courtesy of the artists. 16) Tim Fain, poster for “RESILIENCE,” 2020. Courtesy of the artist. 17) Meg Franklin, album cover for Qasim Naqvi, Beta, 2020. Erased Tapes Records. Courtesy of the artist. 18) Caitlin Macbride and Sam Stewart, Useless Flowers, 2020. Installation view, Fisher Parrish Gallery, February 21–April 5, 2020. 19) Ka Baird, album cover for Respires, 2019. RVNG Intl. Courtesy of the artist.

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