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April Issue 2006
Appalachian State University in Boone, NC, Offers New Exhibitions at the Turchin Center for the Visual Arts
Appalachian State University's Turchin Center for the Visual Arts combines the sights and sounds of art for a springtime celebration of the senses! Partnering with Appalachian's Hayes School of Music, Department of Theatre and Dance, Department of Art and visiting international artists, the center offers two months of exhibitions, performances, residencies, and interactive opportunities designed to explore the relationship between the visual and the aural.
The exhibition's opening, on Apr. 7, 2006, will feature two special musical performances. Hayes School of Music professor Shawn Roberts will lead a performance by Watauga County Elementary School students from grades 6-8. The students have created handmade instruments (including maracas made from beaded gourds, ceramic whistles, rain sticks, wind chimes and African shakers), and will perform on their creations in the Mayer Gallery. Directly following this performance, Appalachian's Department of Theatre and Dance Chair Ray Miller and professor Kate Hobgood join students from their department to present An Evening of Broadway Music. This production highlights our campus talent and offers another experience combining visual arts and music/sound. The Apr. 7 performances will take place in the Mayer Gallery, surrounded by the Appalachian Mountain Photography Competition exhibition, which will be on view through Apr. 29, 2006.
The visual arts offerings include three exhibitions in the West Wing: See Hear! in Gallery A; A Celebration of Music in Art: Works From the Dr. Artine and Teddy Artinian Gift to Appalachian State University's Permanent Collection in Gallery B; and A Student Focus Exhibition: Sound and Sculpture in the Carroll Gallery. All West Wing exhibitions will run through May 20, 2006. The East Wing's Catwalk Community Gallery will feature New Works by Joe Bigley, which will be on display through Apr. 29, 2006.
See Hear! is an exhibition created by artists Stephen Piccolo and Gak Soto who investigate the relationship between visual and acoustic art. Their works build upon Dadaist and Futurist movements, which created challenging new work that was reinvestigated and expanded upon by mid-20th century artists, whose work often included the creation of visual images, performances and sound. Continuing technological advances and a strong inclination of contemporary artists to explore multi-disciplinary works have kept "sound art" at the forefront of the contemporary art scene. See Hear! is a further exploration of how "sound art" challenges our personal constructs of what "art" is - and the kind of art a visitor to an art museum might expect to experience. Throughout the exhibition's duration, visitors will experience an interactive setting that offers a creative and fun way to consider the relationship between sight and sound.
During the period of Apr. 7-15, the Turchin Center welcomes internationally acclaimed artists Stephen Piccolo and Gak Sato to participate in a Visiting Artists Residency. The residency offers sound as an expanded context for experiencing the visual arts. The focus of the residency and the sound experimentations is not centered on the creation of a final "product" in a traditional sense; rather it will hold as its goal the generation of questions, interactions, and future research.
In search of this goal the visiting artists will join community members for a special event - an evening of sound experimentation and creation - on Apr. 14, in Gallery A, from 7-9pm. Together with students or local artists, musicians, poets and performers in Boone and in Italy (collaborating via web), Stephen Piccolo and Gak Sato will develop a series of interactive sound works linked to specific objects in the show See Hear! Piccolo and Sato explain that their "experiment (is) to use the tools of music/sound/performance as a way to explore the intrinsic 'viewing time' of a painting, drawing, sculpture or photograph." Visitors can enjoy a "noisy" experience of the exhibition with many different performers and guided viewer participation during the course of this special evening at the Turchin Center.
Stephen Piccolo was born in 1954 in New Hampshire. He attended school in New York at Bard College and New York University. After studies in New York (Roswell Rudd, Charlie Haden) he began his professional career in the early 1970s playing standup bass in jazz groups. Toward the end of the Seventies he founded, together with John and Evan Lurie, Arto Lindsay and Tony Fier, the group The Lounge Lizards. Over a span of about five years, the group released several recordings and performed for a devoted fan base at international festivals and well-known venues worldwide. Piccolo currently lives and works in Milan, Italy.
Gak Sato was born in Tokyo in 1969. Creator of the Tokyo-based band Diet Music, in 1999 he became Artistic Director of Temposphere, the contemporary music label of Right Tempo Records in Milan, Italy. Sato has participated on various remix projects with the Easy Tempo label, which reissues and remixes Italian soundtracks of the 60s and 70s. Since 2002 he has held the position of professor of Techniques of Sound in Art at the Accademia Carrara fine arts academy of Bergamo, Italy. He is currently participating in a yearlong tribute to John Cage - a series of events and performances entitled A Year from Cage, and will soon release his third album, Informed Consent. He currently lives and works in Milan, Italy.
Piccolo and Sato have collaborated with many visual artists on performances, installations and videos. Since the 1970s, Piccolo was occasionally active on what was called the "performance art scene" in New York, with the project Domestic Exile. Today, the research on urban sounds and drifting has led to works made by Piccolo and Sato that border on the notion of installation, though the musical side is always present. In the field of design, Piccolo has worked on sounds for objects found in the home, for companies like Alessi, the Italian design factory. Piccolo and Sato have also composed the music for the ADI film on the history of the Compasso d'Oro prize. Recent works include a video with Adrian Paci, an installation with Ivo Bonacorsi, sounds for design companies Zanotta and Alias. Piccolo and Sato are on the faculty for 2005-06 (their fourth year) at Accademia Carrara of Bergamo, Italy, teaching a sound design course.
Other special events in conjunction with the See Hear! exhibition include a series of music performances held in partnership with the university's Hayes School of Music that focus on the relationship between sight and sound. Student ensembles will perform in galleries throughout the West Wing from noon-pm on Apr. 12, 26 and May 3. On Apr. 19, also from noon-1pm, a special performance by Sunday's Well, the resident Irish band at Appalachian's Hayes School of Music, will take place in the Mayer Gallery. The group is comprised of five musicians who share a love of traditional music: Gabe Fankhauser (guitar), Scott Meister (bodhr·n, auxiliary percussion), Una Pett (fiddle), Liz Rose (Celtic Harp) and Nancy Schneeloch-Bingham (flute and pennywhistle), who have been playing together since 2003. All of the members of the group are faculty at Appalachian's Hayes School of Music, with the exception of Una Pett, who is on faculty in the Department of Art.
The See Hear! exhibition and extended programming are supported by a generous gift from Dr. Peter and Joni Webb Petschauer. The exhibition will run through May 20, 2006.
Complimenting the extraordinary
See Hear! programming are exhibitions in the centerís
West Wing. A Celebration of Music in Art: Works From the Dr.
Artine and Teddy Artinian Gift to Appalachian State University's
Permanent Collection will open in Gallery B, and A Student
Focus Exhibition: Sound and Sculpture will be on view in the
Carroll Gallery.
Dr. Artine Artinian and his late wife Teddy always had a fondness
for Appalachian State University and its art programs. When it
came time to disperse some of their lifetime collection of artwork
from around the world, they thought of their friends at Appalachian.
A Celebration of Music in Art represents a small sample
of the collection of more than 250 drawn and painted works on
paper gifted to the university in 1999. All of the works in this
exhibition celebrate the theme of music in art.
Sound and Sculpture features works created by students of a Modeling and Casting class taught by William W. Donnan, visiting artist/lecturer with Appalachian's Department of Art, and the Carving and Construction students of the department's own Sonny Struss. Donnan, who will exhibit along with the students, lives and works in North Carolina and has exhibited widely. In 1997-98 Donnan was a participant in the 11th Rosen Outdoor Sculpture Competition and Exhibition, presented by the university's acclaimed An Appalachian Summer Festival.
Additionally, the center's East Wing Catwalk Community Gallery will open New Works by Joe Bigley. Sculptor Bigley received his degree in painting from Appalachian's Department of Art in 2004. As he pursues his artistic career, the Turchin Center welcomes his demonstration of another aspect of his creative talents with a sculpture exhibition.
The Turchin Center also compliments its exhibition programming with workshops for art lovers of all ages, programmed by its Community Art School, and held in and around the Arnold P. Rosen Education Wing. Workshops for April and May begin on Apr. 1 and run through May 10, and include creative movement, self portraits, and creating and composing on found object musical sculptures. Fees for the workshops vary, and pre-registration is required. To register or request a full workshop schedule, call 828/262-3017.
For more information check our NC Institutional Gallery listings, call the Center at 828/262-3017 or at (www.tcva.org).
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