Gas Water Nothing

Fellow Urban Sketchers correspondent Lapin made a stop in New York City on his way to the Symposium in Portland. We met up on Sunday, July 25 to do some sketching in DUMBO, Brooklyn. We were joined by Hélèn Pé (a Parisian illustrator now living in New York) and Neil (boyfriend of New York-based illustrator and USk correspondent Veronica Lawlor, who is currently teaching in Paris before she heads to the Symposium herself).

First it was sweltering hot, and we did some sketching in the Main Street section of Brooklyn Bridge State Park. Then we got rained on and took shelter at Smack Mellon. Then we went back outside the temperature had dropped from sweltering to chilly. We finished our sketches from the first spot before getting rained on again. Here's my sketch from there:



Lapin and I also left some sketches of the storm in a guestbook for Mary Mattingly's Flock House prototype at Smack Mellon. I think Lapin took a snapshot of them. (Speaking of Mary Mattingly, I have a great sketch of the Waterpod that I've yet to post.)

Next, we sheltered at Jane's Carousel where we chatted with realist oil-painter Caleb Nelson Carter who was working on the early stages of an elaborate painting. Here is my sketch of Jane's Carousel:



Then we headed out to the newly opened Pier One section of the park (and before you ask, no, there wasn't any wicker furniture to be found). Here's Neil, Lapin, and Hélèn (left to right) on Granite Prospect, a magnificent staircase made out of granite salvaged from the Roosevelt Island Bridge.



It was a great afternoon hanging out and sketching together, with at least three seasons' worth of weather!

Wow, my new grease pencil lets me (or maybe forces me to!) work nice and fast. Fun.

The Flow Trio (Louie Belogenis, sax; Joe Morris, bass; Charles Downs--formerly and much better known as Rashid Bakr, drums) performing at the first annual Albert Ayler Festival, held on Roosevelt Island on Saturday July 10, 2010.

It was a really nice event, marred only by the recurring problem of overly-shrill, over-amplified soprano saxophones.

I hope they'll do many more of these!

mp3 (6:36)

field recordings, synthesizers, carpet, harmonica, delay, amplifiers, etc.

Personnel: Andrea Williams, Chris Williams, Jason Das

Download

The Glass Bees will be performing on Saturday and Sunday, June 12-13 as part of the FIGMENT festival of arts on Governors Island, just off the southern tip of Manhattan, and a stone’s throw from Red Hook, Brooklyn. Even if we weren’t participating, you really shouldn’t miss this one-of-a-kind explosion of creativity at one of the most spectacular locations in New York City.

Our interactive, site-specific performance “Reading Governors Island” will combine sound, images, and audience-contributed spoken word. We’ve compiled historical and contemporary texts about Governors Island and invite FIGMENT attendees to be photographed and recorded reading excerpts. Later in the day, we will present a performance mixing the voices and faces we’ve collected with other sounds and images from around the island. This project is an exploration of the location and the context of FIGMENT, bringing past and present, environment and human intervention, and performers and audience into play.

We will begin recording participants’ voices at 10:00 AM and perform our installation at about 3:00 PM each day. Come early, let us record you, enjoy the festival, and then come back later on to hear what we’ve come up with.

We should also add that if you’re a parent, FIGMENT is a great way to experience lots of art in a setting that young children can totally enjoy!

Maps of the festival will be available at the event. We’ll be set up between Building 555 and the harbor, near the intersection of Craig and Clayton. Please note this is a different location from what was originally announced.

You can reach Governors Island via ferry from the Battery Maritime Building (located just east of the Staten Island Ferry in Manhattan) or Fulton Ferry Landing in Brooklyn. Here’s full directions. And check out all the other interesting exhibits and activities on the Island.

We hope to see you there!

A nice place to get some cool and quiet (and caffeine!) in a hot and loud part of town.

Not much to say about this... very New England in Spring!

I didn't particularly participate in the May 15 Sketchcrawl, but I did do some sketches, so ... anyway, here they are!

mp3 (7:30)

voices, field recordings, WMD Geiger Counter, Loud Objects Noise Toys, delay, amplifiers, etc.

Personnel: Chris Williams, Jason Das

Download

My recent post about Ne(x)tworks performing Morton Feldman at Issue Project Room reminded me that I never posted this sketch from last summer of the Flux Quartet performing in Suzanne Bocanegra's "I Write the Songs" at the World Financial Center Winter Gardens as part of the Big Draw 2009. The piece involved audience members defacing/decorating old pages of sheet music which were then presented (via pulley and string) to the string quartet, who interpreted the new score. It was pretty great!



Oh, and Big Draw 2010 is coming up soon--May 15, up at the beautiful Wave Hill in the Bronx. It's long commute from where I live in Brooklyn, but I'd like to try to get there, ideally before noon when admission is free! Maybe it will be good weather for bicycling up the Hudson River path. (It's the same day as a SketchCrawl, too. Hmmm.)

We’ll be performing with Ranjit Bhatnagar on his handmade instruments along with other instruments (mostly made in factories in China or Japan) at the opening of the ScrapCycle show at Devotion Gallery In Williamsburg.

This performance will be more open-ended and expansive than our March performance which was dedicated to demonstrating some of these instruments.

Bora Yoon and Tom Vanderwall will also be performing.

The opening opens at 7:00 p.m. on May 7th at Devotion Gallery, located at 54 Maujer Street, Brooklyn, NY, 11206. The price of admission is a used water bottle, which they may be using for some project or perhaps to serve you the complementary refreshments.

ScrapCycle places an exchange-value on upcycled and reused materials, in order to probe the environmental effects of economic perspective. By presenting concrete implementations of reuse and recombination, ScrapCycle(reUSE/reCOMBINE) serves to liken the small pervasive effects of social sculpture, environmental activism, and economic perspective to a fine-tuning of interdependent parameters with global results. ScrapCycle(reUSE/reCOMBINE) references complexity science as it relates to political economy, ecology, and methods of reuse and recombination (i.e., small-world networks, social systems theory, ecological systems theory, evolutionary computation, genetic algorithms, neural networking).