Date/Time
Date(s) - 03/06
8:00pm - 9:30pm
Location
Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts
Address
360 Kansas St
San Francisco, California
94103
Please join us at the Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts bar for a special live presentation of Heavy Breathing A/V with Peter Simensky featuring a live set by Sara Mameni and Roshanak Kheshti and recordings by Alison O’Daniel. Free & open to the public.
“Rock Talk…” consists of a series of live performances and sound recordings positioning critical conversations and sonic experiments between rocks and humans. “Rock Talk…” includes the broadcast of live audio sets and recordings through shortwave AM transmission to uniquely designed pyrite (fool’s gold) radio receivers placed within the Wattis Institute bar. Sara Mameni and Roshanak Kheshti will perform “Veil Manifesto,” engaging veils as historically vital material objects. Through text, sound and image, the lecture/performance manifests the vital energy of the veil on stage, reminding us of the revolutionary potential of bodies in protest. A recording of Alison O’Daniel’s “Breathing Isn’t Silent” (2017) first aired on RAAR Radio Rotterdam and will also be broadcast. Through collaborations with composers and musicians as well as the experiences of deaf and hard of hearing friends regarding sound, O’Daniel’s work aims at building a visual, aural, and haptic vocabulary as a means of storytelling. A live recording of the evening will be available for continued listening on Heavy Breathing‘s website.
About the Artists:
Peter Simensky is an interdisciplinary artist whose work has been featured in solo exhibitions at the Portland Institute of Contemporary Art, Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego; Museum 52, New York; Museum 500meter, Sapporo; The Swiss Institute, New York; and Project Row Houses, Houston. He is a recipient of the NYFA Fellows Grant, Oregon Arts Commission / Hallie Ford Family Opportunity Grant, Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants, MacDowell Colony, and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture to name a few. Currently he is producing work and research on the silver industry for the La Tallera, Proyecto Siqueiros in Mexico City / Cuernavaca, MX. Peter Simensky Chairs the Sculpture, Individualized, and Community Arts programs at California College of the Arts.
Roshanak Kheshti is Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies and affiliate faculty in the Critical Gender Studies Program at the University of California, San Diego. She is the author of “Modernity’s Ear: Listening to Race and Gender in World Music” (NYU Press, 2015) and “Wendy Carlos’s Switched on Bach,” (Bloomsbury, 2019). She has published numerous musical recordings both as a former member of Bay Area-based experimental rock band The Ebb and Flow and independently as composer and performer for independent film.
Sara Mameni is Faculty in the School of Critical Studies and Director of Aesthetics and Politics Program at California Institute of the Arts. Her specialization is contemporary art in SWANA region with a focus on queer of color theory. Her current research explores biopolitics, racial discourse in the Anthropocene, post-humanist aesthetics and the geo-ecological age of petroleum. She is currently working on her book manuscript titled, Crude Aesthetics.
Alison O’Daniel is a Los Angeles-based visual artist from Miami, Florida. Her work weaves narratives of aural sensitivity and experience between the mediums of film, object-making, and performance. Through her collaborations with deaf and hearing composers and artists, her work invites sensitivity to loss and abundance of sound and its impact on social situations. She has exhibited, screened, and performed at the Ford Theater with FLAX French Los Angeles Exchange (2018); Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery (2017); Art in General, New York (2016); Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2016); The Drawing Center, New York (2016); Top-kino, Vienna (2016); Centre d’Art Contemporain Passerelle, Brest, France (2015); Aspen Art Museum (2016); LA Louver, Los Angeles (2013); and Samuel Freeman Gallery, Los Angeles (2013). She has completed artist residencies at Wexner Center for the Arts (2014), Fine Arts Work Center (2012–13), Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (2007), and others.
ABOUT HEAVY BREATHING
Heavy Breathing is a series of experimental movement seminars designed by artists that combine physical activity with group discussion on ideas related to their creative practice. Critical discourse often feels heady, abstract, and divorced from the body. How do conversations change when we are moving and out of breath? What new modes of thinking become possible?
Heavy Breathing is organized by Sophia Wang and Lisa Rybovich Crallé. Now in its fifth season, the series has received partnering support from Southern Exposure’s Alternative Exposure program, the Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive, the SF Art Book Fair 2017, and the San Francisco Arts Commission.
