LEAF2023: Sync Exhibition

LEAF Presents Sync: Work by Signal Culture Artists in Residence

The Collective Community Arts Center
201 N. Public Road
Lafayette, CO 80026

Exhibition Dates: March 10 – April 30
Opening Reception: Friday, March 10, 6 – 8 pm
Curator Talk by Debora Bernagozzi: Saturday, April 1, noon

Performance by Phillip David Stearns: Saturday, April 22, 4 pm

The Lafayette Electronic Arts Festival is excited to present Sync, an exhibition of video art, prints, and textile pieces by alumni of the experimental media arts residency Signal Culture, which has recently relocated to Loveland. The artists featured, Yvonne Buchanan, Monica Duncan & Senem Pirler, Lovid, and Phillip David Stearns all have internationally recognized careers. Much of the work in the show was created in part through their time as artists or toolmakers in residence at Signal Culture.

Signal Culture’s residency program launched in January 2013, and welcomed over 400 residents from around the US and close to 30 countries to its former space in Owego, NY. The residency studios are being rebuilt at Artworks Center for Contemporary Art in Loveland. The artist residency offers a unique studio featuring rare analog machines and new custom software, seamlessly integrated to encourage real time improvisation and play. While some residents create work in a single live recording, others gather a collection of files and draw from them for years to come. As part of their mission of building community, Signal Culture has toolmaker or researcher residencies running concurrently with the artist residencies. All residents have access to the media arts library with books, periodicals, a viewing and listening area, and ephemera. The toolmakers have a space with a soldering area, electronic components, and tools.

Phillip David Stearns has attended both artist and toolmaker residencies at Signal Culture. The exhibition will feature his high resolution analog audio-video synthesizer, currently housed in a Nintendo Gameboy case, lovingly referred to as Slain Boy. The synth and work from it with be displayed in Sync, then Stearns will be doing a live performance with the synth on April 22nd. Stearns says, “The performance itself is seen as navigating a constantly evolving terrain or landscape within the flow of intermixing signals. Although it may appear as though, as the performer, I’m “controlling” the performance, quite the opposite is true. The system is inherently chaotic and defies control. The instrument guides me into different sonic and visual terrain as much as I direct our journey.”

Yvonne Buchanan’s video Spoken imagines “the lost language of Africans in America, the tribal voice, the clicks and rolls of the tongue… eventually evolving through enslavement, and finally lost to English.” Her Interiors prints were created digitally from one file, with experiments in changing both code and output.

Monica Duncan & Senem Pirler’s collaborative video Confessions on a Transmission Line explores “the audiovisual process of feedback as a spiritual practice in relation to Camp and queer potentiality.” Using a discarded megaphone … “as a tool and instrument to both project and receive transmission frequencies, we are searching for a way to communicate with our queer ancestors and those yet to be born.”