LEAF2023: Rue Bainbridge

Friday April 21, 7PM

Founder’s Hall, Colorado Music Festival & Center for Musical Arts, 200 East Baseline Rd., Lafayette, CO 80026

Rue Bainbridge, the duo of Gryphon Rue and Benton C Bainbridge, exists in the intersection of expanded cinema and sonic art. Generating electric calligraphy with a hacked game console, the light patterns become a score, with visual rhythmicity suggesting electro-acoustic events. Perception shifts as light and sound momentarily synchronize, tracing a zone of concentrated intricacy.

Coaxing voltages into waves of dynamic energy, the duo improvise a space for collective dreaming, where quirks of human hand and electricity spawn impressions of nature and asemic writing. Pure and synthesized tones cast an aura of suspended disbelief—ethereal pictures emerge from the earth-bound instruments: elemental scenes, avalanches in wintry landscapes, rocks careening down a mountainside. 

Through the inducement of hypnotic states, Rue Bainbridge create “high touch” work in subversion of techno-logic; retrieving the primacy of intimate experience over the alienation of mediated, distant connections. Eschewing the convenience of digital recall, each performance interweaves the sharpening of perception with pleasureful immersion.

Rue Bainbridge is the first recipient of the Nam June Paik and Shigeko Kubota Video Art prize (2019). The project has been supported with residencies at spaces in transition: an Italianate palazzo that housed destitute millionaires, an abandoned 18th century hotel favored by rock stars, and an officer’s house on a former military island. Rue Bainbridge have been presented by Roulette Intermedium, Pace Gallery, Hauser & Wirth, The Hepworth Wakefield, Slate Projects / Foreign Domestic, Center for Visual Music, Public Works at Governor’s Island, Andrew Freedman Home, and Shigeko Kubota Video Art Foundation. Projects are realized as immersive audiovisual performances, yielding single-channel artworks with decentralized provenance. Rue Bainbridge is supported by Andrew Freedman Home Artist-In-Residence program in The Bronx, NYC

Individually, Rue Bainbridge have presented on 5 continents, at Whitney Museum of American Art, Museum of Modern Art, Lincoln Center, Museum of the Moving Image, American Museum of Natural History, The Kitchen (NYC), Frieze Art Fair (NYC), EMPAC (Troy, NY), SFMoMA (San Francisco), Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden (Washington, D.C.), Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Ballroom Marfa (Marfa, TX), Boston Cyberarts Festival, l’Auditori (Barcelona), Fundación Juan March (Madrid), LUX2006 (Sevilla), Auditorium Parco della Musica (Roma), Sonic Acts (Amsterdam), Teatro Colón CETC (Buenos Aires), International Horticultural Expo (Xi’an, China), Dak’art Biennale (Dakar, Senegal), and MTV Networks (global).