March 17, 2022, 7PM at Ilya Fridman Gallery, NYC
Curated by Phill Niblock for the Experimental Intermedia Gallery Series.
Liz Phillips will live process Heidi Howard’s gestures as Howard paints Phillips picking up sounds of fish movement and shell textures. Phillips has been recording brooks, rivers, streams, and oceans for use in sound and media installations since high school. Live fish were used in some of her pieces, such as Koi and Fluid Sound, shown at Ijsbreker and Kala Institute respectively. Other works use vibrating water such as Wavetable, shown at the Frederieke Taylor Gallery. Howard and Phillips have collaborated previously on a large-scale sound and mural installation commissioned by the Queens Museum, Relative Fields in a Garden.The year and a half installation included performances within the installation with Cynthia Koppe (dance improvisation) and Earl Howard (saxophone improvisation), and a VR interactive navigation through Relative Fields constructed with the Virtual Dream Center.
This collaboration immerses the audience in our ongoing investigation into the life of water.
The sonic elements of this piece use live samples of shells, fish and water, live fish, field recordings, and processing. Mari Kimura’s Mugic gesture interface (worn by Howard as she paints), lights sensors, contact microphones and hydrophones integrate help synchronize the improvisation materials.
Heidi Howard (b. 1986, New York, NY) is a painter who lives and works in Queens, New York. Howard's figurative work draws on the intimacies of friendship as a foundational element of their inventive paintings, which are characterized by loose, free strokes and detailed, staccato texture. A 2014 graduate of Columbia University's Master of Fine Arts program, Howard has twice exhibited their work in solo exhibitions at Nancy Margolis Gallery, New York: the 2017 show Woven Traits, as well as Portrait and Dream in 2015. Additional solo and two person exhibitions include, Like Water For Faces, Continuo, Amsterdam, Netherlands and Roots Run Gold to Pink, Gaa Gallery, Provincetown, MA, USA; Heidi Howard and Liz Phillips: Relative Fields in a Garden, Queens Museum, Queens, NY, USA, Heidi Howard and Katy Cowan: Something of a body, of a tempo, et al. gallery, San Francisco, CA, USA; and Esteban Cabeza de Baca and Heidi Howard: Verano, Gaa Gallery, Wellfleet, MA, USA. Group exhibitions include zeit-geist-zeit, Gaa Gallery, Wellfleet, MA, USA; Against Forgetting, Gaa Gallery, Provincetown, MA, USA; Red Matters, Hunterdon Museums of Art, Clinton, NJ; Bomb Pop Up!, Brooklyn, NY; and Intimisms, James Cohan Gallery, New York, NY. Howard's press reviews include The Brooklyn Rail, Vogue and online magazines artcritical.com and onverge.com.
Liz Phillips, Queens-based artist, has been making interactive multimedia installations for the past 50 years, which combine audio and visual forms with new technologies to create an interactive experience. Born in New Jersey in 1951, Phillips received a B.A. from Bennington College in 1973. In 1981, she co-founded Parabola Arts Foundation, a not-for-profit organization created by five media artists from varied disciplines (music, sculpture, film, video) which provides funding for art-related projects. In 1987 Phillips received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a 2019 NYFA fellowship, grants from the David Bermant Foundation, The Agnes Gund Foundation, NYSCA Commissions (2007, 2004, 2000,1988,1986,1984) NEA Grants and Commissions (1987,1984, 1985,1983, 1981,1976). Phillips has exhibited interactive installations at numerous art museums, alternative spaces, festivals, and public spaces. These include multiple installations at the Queens Museum, The Whitney Museum of American Art, Lincoln Center, The Milwaukee Art Museum, the Spoleto Festival USA, the Walker Art Museum, Ars Electronica, The Kitchen, and Creative Time. She has also shown her work at Jacob’s Pillow, The Stedelijk Museum, Akademie der Künste, Berlin, Gemeentemuseum Den Haag, Galerie René Block, Frederieke Taylor Gallery, White Box, The Jewish Museum, The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Capp Street Project. Phillips has also collaborated with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company and Nam June Paik, Simone Forti, Alison Knowles, Yoshimasa Wada, Heidi Howard, Earl Howard, Cynthia Koppe and Nitin Mukul. Her work was presented in unusual public locations by Bronx Frontier Development Corporation (using a wind turbine), the Cleveland Orchestra, IBM Japan, and the World Financial Center.
Technical and Sonic Assistants:
Isabella Stevenson
Cesar Garcia
Note about this video: This video is unedited from a live improvisation.
The beginning introduction talk for the event is placed at the end.