Thursday, May 19, 2022—Sunday, May 22, 2022
8pm doors / 8:30–10pm show
Tickets $10 per show (discounted or free for members)
Performers and tickets links listed below
Mask & proof of vaccine required for entry
Bimodal Press is thrilled to announce the publication and performance series Gravity Spells II: Bay Area New Music and Expanded Cinema Art. The project is twofold: Both a physical document release incorporating original films, sound, music, and essays, as well as a corresponding performance series featuring over twenty-four Bay Area artists collaborating through live cinema, music, and sound art practices. The live series will be co-presented by the San Francisco Cinematheque and will be held at The Lab in San Francisco on May 19th, 20th, 21st and 22nd.
The Gravity Spells II publication houses two LP’s, four DVD’s, a perfect bound letterpress booklet with essays, color images, silkscreened show poster and announcement card. Four original sound and music works occupy one side of the two LPs, while four original films are contained within one each of the four DVD’s. These commissioned works are 20-minutes long and designed to be experienced interchangeably. This encourages a matrix of possibilities while emphasizing the element of chance tied directly to live muliti-media performance (dropping the needle on the record and hitting “Play” on the DVD player will always result in a different event).
PERFORMANCES
Thursday, May 19, 2022
Alfonso Alvarez + Laetitia Sonami
Keith Evans + Suki O'Kane
Kevin Corcoran + Zack Parinella
Get Tickets Now
Friday, May 20, 2022
Bill Basquin + Paul DeMarinis
Lynn Marie Kirby + Zach Iannazzi
Headboggle + Greta Snider
Get Tickets Now
Saturday, May 21, 2022
Scott Stark + Wobbly
Amma Ateria + Mark Wilson
Anna Geyer + Billy Gomberg
Get Tickets Now
Sunday, May 22, 2022
Alix Blevins + Zachary James Watkins
Molly Fishman + Janis Crystal Lipzin
Joshua Churchill + Konrad Steiner
Get Tickets Now
PUBLICATION ARTISTS
Paul DeMarinis (sound/music), Keith Evans (film), Zach Iannazzi (film), Janis Crystal Lipzin (film), Suki O’Kane (sound/music), Laetitia Sonami (sound/music), Scott Stark (film), Zachary Watkins (sound/music)
PUBLICATION WRITERS
John Davis, Steve Anker, Brian Darr, Paul DeMarinis, Tooth (arc), Kathleen Quillian and Tanya Zimbardo
KEY BIOS
Alfonso Alvarez - Alfonso Alvarez is a California filmmaker living in the Bay Area. From short work to multi-projection live events, Alfonso has collaborated with a wide range of artists to produce work that focuses on artistic innovation, hybrid expression and alternative production structures. His work measures the natural distance between minute details in life and the larger structures that make up the human experience of the world. Lately his focus has been on beekeeping as a means to explore the impact of climate change on plant phenology and native pollinator biology.
Steve Anker - Dean of CalArts' School of Film/Video from Fall 2002 through Spring 2014, began screenings as Program Director for the Boston Film/Video Foundation (1977-1980), was Artistic Director of the San Francisco Cinematheque (1982-2002), and began and co-curated Film At REDCAT (L.A.) from 2003 until his retirement in 2020. Anker curated programs for the Museum of Modern Art, Pacific Film Archive, London International Film Festival, the Austrian Cultural Ministry, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Sharjah Art Biennial, Ann Arbor Film Festival and the Hammer Museum. Anker has taught at Massachusetts College of Art, San Francisco Art Institute, Bard College, San Francisco State University and CalArts.
Amma Ateria - Amma Ateria is an electroacoustic composer/sound artist born in Hong Kong, based in California. Her work explores themes in the coexistence of polarity, polyrhythmic occurrences, and psychoacoustics with focus in equal-loudness contour. With an immediacy of tension and release, her performances navigate between oppositions with stark transitions, transforming deafening of noise into meditative stance. Her research focus in objective/subjective perceptions of sound, noise colours, and multi-channel behavioral assignments. With memories of condensed cities, she gravitates to frequencies of close-ranged aircrafts, inaudible conversations, out of body experiences, sustained harmonics, and synthesized speed of air. Her work has been presented at SoART/Austria, Titanik Gallery/Finland, The Stone/New York, SFEMF/San Francisco, BAMPFA/Berkeley, Exploratorium/SF, Marfa Sounding/Marfa, CCRMA/Stanford University, YBCA/SF, Minnesota Street Project, Other Minds: Latitudes, Recombinant 'Clouds of Confoundment’.
arc - operates as a collective entity which seeks to work outside of a framework that privileges the solitary authorship of objects as a point of artistic creation and finitude, looking instead to a process of intersubjective communal encounter as a locus from which the work generates. As conductive vessels, a configuration of material elements are used to initiate this process, including (but not limited to): photochemical film, performance, sound & light installation, written language, & time-based sculpture. arc work has been presented at numerous galleries, museums, and exhibition spaces around the world, including: The Lab, Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco Cinematheque, San Francisco Film Festival, City Limits Gallery, Shapeshifters Gallery, CounterPulse, Artist’s Television Access, The Stud, In Process Projects, SOMArts, Mutek SF, Sutro Baths Cave, Ann Arbor Film Festival, Massart Film Society (Boston),The Nightingale (Chicago), Experimental Sound Studio (Chicago), Dirt Palace (Providence, RI), Spectacle Theater (Brooklyn), Squeaky Wheel Film & Media Art Center (Buffalo), NDSM Treehouse (Amsterdam), All Hallows Church (London), Atelier Äuglein (Berlin), L'Abominable (La Courneuve), Les Innatendus Film Festival (Lyon), La Cueva (Mexico City), among others.
Bill Basquin - Bill Basquin is an artist who works in multiple media – often, 16mm film. Bill’s practice includes attuning to worlds both wild and domestic; he filmed his forthcoming feature-length film From Inside of Here (2020) by making eight solo camping trips to the Gila National Forest in New Mexico, where the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service pilots a re-introduction program of the near-extinct Mexican Grey Wolf. Bill’s films have been shown at the Mix Experimental Queer Film Festival, the Sundance Film Festival, the Ann Arbor Film Festival, and the New York Museum of Modern Art.
Alix Blevins - Alix Blevins is a filmmaker, curator and projectionist from the Bay Area. She is a member of Black Hole Collective Film Lab and has taught workshops on handmade and DIY filmmaking practices. Alix also co-organizes an artist-made film screening series in Oakland called the latent image which was awarded a 2019 Southern Exposure grant. She is currently pursuing an MFA in Film/Video at California Institute of the Arts.
Joshua Churchill - Joshua Churchill is an Oakland-based cross-disciplinary artist whose site-specific sound and light work takes the form of both installation and performance, often blurring the line between the two. Utilizing a variety of instruments, electronics, and field recordings, Churchill interweaves resonant drones, abstract textures, and pulsing feedback into immersive waves of sound. Churchill has collaborated extensively with filmmakers John Davis and Paul Clipson, and also performs solo under the moniker Plumes. He has previously performed in experimental drone/metal projects including ByaGtor, Riqis, and Tecumseh. Churchill has been a resident at AIR Krems in Krems an der Donau, Austria, and Djerassi Resident Artists Program in California, and has performed and exhibited extensively throughout the United States and abroad
Kevin Corcoran - Kevin Corcoran works with percussion, field recording and electronics with an open interest in sound as medium as it moves through contexts of music, art, communication, and place. He improvises, arranges sounds and collaborates across disciplines and borders having performed throughout the US, Europe and East Asia and with musicians, dancers, filmmakers, writers and visual artists. Interests include emphasizing friction, sympathetic vibration, sustained tones and use of found objects in percussion performance and investigating urban excess and intersections of natural and built space through field recording practice. Kevin is based in San Francisco. In addition to his own work he is active as a curator for the Re:Sound series organized by 23five, a Bay Area nonprofit dedicated to sound in the arts.
Brian Darr - Brian Darr was born in San Francisco in 1973. Not long after, he learned how to identify stars and constellations at the Morrison Planetarium. He enjoys researching and writing about film history subjects, and sometimes puts on multimedia presentations about them.
Paul DeMarinis - Paul DeMarinis has been making noises with wires, batteries and household appliances since the age of four. His works combine interactive software, synthetic speech and noise with obsolete or impossible media. He has exhibited and performed throughout North America, Europe, Australia and Asia.
Keith Evans - Keith Evans is an artist and paranaturalist, working and performing in the Bay Area for over 30 years. Collaboration and co-creation have been a core element of his artistic practice having founded the experimental cinematic trio silt in 1989 as well as participating in many duos, groups and ensembles. He creates artwork in a cross-media array; Using language, graphics, book arts, installation, kinetic sculpture, dance, film, video and sound, primarily for performance or with an expanded idea of performativity. His artworks are translation systems, fascination devices, extra-cinematic experiences that display the phenomenon of cinema as an ecology and system, one that is unfixed and accreting, neither nostalgic nor utopian. “I consider my systems alchemical divination tools for myself and viewers, in the traditions of the poetic emblems of the hermetic sciences.”
Molly Fishman - Molly Fishman is a San Francisco based Composer focusing on live sound processing, tape manipulation, and site-specific acoustics. Originally from Chicago, she holds a master’s degree of Music in Composition from DePaul University and has worked with New Music groups such as Bang on a Can, Verdehr Trio, The Living Earth Show, and members of Eighth Blackbird. Since 2012, Molly has been focusing on live sound processing through digital delay. Her current project My Favorite Punk Band involves producing cassette tapes which engage their own time scale to create a new work by manipulating live recordings, creating a physical artifact of a non-existent performance.
Derek Gedalecia - Derek Gedalecia, a.k.a. Headboggle, has been performing electronic keyboard-based soundscapes for several years in the Bay Area in over a hundred local performances at venues ranging from GTK to YBCA. Incorporating lowbrow with highbrow art, music, and comedy, Head Boggle’s intent is to fuse together a new ecstatic improvisational performance style with a carefully crafted musical underbed. In his formative years, Gedalecia studied classical and ragtime piano from noted ragtime composer/revivalist Dr. Brian Dykstra.
Anna Geyer - Anna Geyer is an award-winning experimental filmmaker and writer. A fascination with non-traditional methods of both production and presentation is apparent in her work. Cameraless, non-representational images combined with found footage work have been the emphasis of much her recent efforts, although she frequently describes her work as, “experimental with a narrative bent.” She teaches cinema classes at City College of San Francisco.
Billy Gomberg - Billy Gomberg is a musician and very occasional multimedia artist living in San Francisco since 2018. His practice incorporates musical material from synthesis and improvisation, various fidelities of field recordings & electroacoustic material, to lay ground and illuminate our duration there, a means to articulate a poetry of our inner lives. Billy’s recorded work has been published by Students of Decay, Dinzu Artefacts, and Another Timbre, among others. Over the past 15 years he has performed around the US, and quite rarely in Europe.
Zach Iannazzi - Zach Iannazzi is an artist based in Oakland, California. His work has been screened at the Austrian Film Museum, Institute of Contemporary Art (Boston), Image Forum (Tokyo), New York Film Festival, Pacific Film Archive, and TIFF Bell Lightbox.
Lynn Marie Kirby - Lynn Marie Kirby works in a variety of time-based forms, including film, public installation and performance, engaging our relationship to place, often with text, often with collaborators. Lately she has performed site interventions outside and alongside established art systems enlarging the idea of the exhibition and its relation to the public.
Jon Leidecker - (aka Wobbly) is a human in the loop, improvising with machines that listen, making music that models a survivable version of the world. Specializing in live performance, his approach to collage blurs the line between solo and group work -- in addition to touring and recording with Negativland and the Thurston Moore Group, other recent collaborators include Jennifer Walshe, Sue-C, Dieter Moebius & Tim Story, Laetitia Sonami, Thomas Dimuzio, Matmos, People Like Us, Zeena Parkins, Fred Frith, Tania Chen, Huun-Huur-Tu and Sagan. Labels that have released his music include Illegal Art, Tigerbeat6, Bureau B and Hausu Mountain. His lectures on the secret histories of electronic music have been presented at Mills, Stanford, Oxford, UC Berkeley / Davis / Santa Cruz, MACBA and Peabody Conservatory. In 2015 he inherited Negativland's long-running Over The Edge radio live mix program, broadcasting from Berkeley's KPFA FM.
Janis Crystal Lipzin - Janis Crystal Lipzin is a visual artist based in Sonoma County, California, who creates multi-disciplinary works ranging from time-based art to printed matter, but is primarily known for her film/photography practices. Throughout her 50-year career, her work has blended an enduring interest in the volatility of nature and human events with a sympathy for alternative, hand-made processes. She taught at the San Francisco Art Institute for 3 decades where she chaired the Film Department. Her work has been recognized internationally with grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Center for Cultural Innovation, and by exhibitions at The Whitney Museum, Film Society of Lincoln Center, the New Museum, Pompidou Museum, and Venice Biennale. She has been active in critical writing and curatorial actions and founded the pioneering microcinema eye music that produced events in San Francisco.
Suki O’Kane - Oakland-based musician, composer, improviser and instigator, Suki O’Kane works with artists from a wide array of of music, movement, expanded cinema and public art genres. She has composed for inkBoat and Theatre of Yugen, performs in the ensembles of Dan Plonsey and Rae Diamond, and is a member of Thingamajigs Performance Group with Dylan Bolles, Keith Evans and Edward Schocker. She is a student of monumental and durational forms. Suki’s work has been supported by the Creative Work Fund, the Zellerbach Family Foundation, Oakland Stock, and New Music USA.
Zack Parrinella - Zack Parrinella is a filmmaker and musician based in Oakland. His work has shown at CROSSROADS and the Havana Film Festival. He is a member of Black Hole Collective Film Lab. When he isn't making films, he makes music, works as a traveling notary and watches plants grow.
Kathleen Quillian - Kathleen Quillian is an Oakland-based artist who works primarily with found imagery, collage and stop-motion animation. She has exhibited in venues and festivals internationally including International Film Festival Rotterdam, San Francisco International Film Festival, Antimatter Film Festival, Animasivo, REDCAT, the Exploratorium and the San Jose Museum of Art, among others. She has served on the boards of directors of San Francisco Cinematheque and Artists’ Television Access and is co-founder and co-director of Shapeshifters Cinema.
Greta Snider - Greta Snider has utilized a combination of original and archival material to create nonfiction art cinema of a personal nature. Her single screen films on 16mm lean heavily on the creative use of montage, interweaving the personal and historical in a number of short essay films. Her stereoscopic performances and installations take the materiality of film and family photos, to reshape themes of memory, loss, and personal histories in a more intimate, affective experience. Snider teaches experimental filmmaking at San Francisco State University.
Laetitia Sonami - Laetitia Sonami is a sound artist, performer, and composer of interactive electronic music who has been based in the San Francisco Bay area since 1978. She is known for her electronic compositions and performances with the ‘’Lady’s Glove’’, an instrument she developed for triggering and manipulating sound in live performance. Many of her compositions include live or sampled text. Sonami also creates sound installation work incorporating household objects embedded with mechanical and electronic components. Although some recordings of her works exist, Sonami generally eschews releasing recorded work.
Konrad Steiner - Konrad Steiner is a filmmaker interested in live cinema, music, and language, who curates and creates single channel and performance works with poets and musicians in the SF Bay Area and beyond. He studied filmmaking at School of the Art Institute of Chicago. BA in Linguistics from Stanford U. Member of the SF Cinematheque curatorial committee (2003-2006); co-founder and producer of kino21.org film and performance series (2007-2010) in San Francisco.
Scott Stark - Scott Stark has made over 80 films and videos since the early 1980s, and has created numerous moving image installations, live performances and photo-collages. He received an MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute and served on the Board of Directors of the San Francisco Cinematheque from 1984-1991. His work has shown nationally and internationally in venues as diverse as New York’s Museum of Modern Art, the San Francisco Cinematheque, the Film Festival Rotterdam, the Tokyo Image Forum, and many others. His 16mm film Angel Beach was invited into the 2002 Whitney Biennial, and in 2007 he received a Guggenheim Fellowship. His 2013 film The Realist showed at numerous worldwide film festivals and was on several year-end “best” lists. His work has garnered numerous awards. He is the webmaster for Flicker (www.hi-beam.net), the web resource for experimental film and video, and in 2012 Scott co-founded an avant garde film screening series in Austin called Experimental Response Cinema (www.ercatx.org). He lives in San Francisco, California.
Tooth - is an artworker, anarchist, and petty thief, living somewhere in so-called California.
Zachary James Watkins - Zachary James Watkins studied composition with Janice Giteck, Jarrad Powell, Robin Holcomb and Jovino Santos Neto at Cornish College. In 2006, Zachary received an MFA in Electronic Music and Recording Media from Mills College where he studied with Chris Brown, Fred Frith, Alvin Curran and Pauline Oliveros. Zachary has received commissions from Documenta 14, the Kronos Quartet, The Living Earth Ensemble, sfsound and the Seattle Chamber Players among others. His 2006 composition Suite for String Quartet was awarded the Paul Merritt Henry Prize for Composition and has subsequently been performed at the Labs 25th Anniversary Celebration, the Labor Sonor Series at Kule in Berlin Germany and in Seattle Wa, as part of the 2nd Annual Town Hall New Music Marathon featuring violist Eyvind Kang. Zachary has performed in numerous festivals across the United States, Mexico and Europe and his band Black Spirituals opened for pioneering Drone Metal band Earth during their 2015 European tour. In 2008, Zachary premiered a new multi-media work entitled Country Western as part of the Meridian Gallery's Composers in Performance Series that received grants from the The American Music Center and The Foundation for Contemporary Arts. An excerpt of this piece is published on a compilation album entitled ”The Harmonic Series‚” alongside Pauline Oliveros, Ellen Fullman, Theresa Wong Charles Curtis and Duane Pitre among others. Zachary recently completed Documentado / Undocumentado a multi-media interactive book in collaboration with Guillermo Gómez Peña, Gustavo Vasquez, Jennifer Gonzalez and Felicia Rice. His sound art work entitled Third Floor::Designed Obsolescence, "spoke as a metaphor for the breakdown of the dream of technology and the myth of our society's permanence," review by Susan Noyes Platt in the Summer 05 issue of ARTLIES. Zachary releases music on the labels Sige, Cassauna, Confront (UK), The Tapeworm and Touch (UK). Novembre Magazine (DE), ITCH (ZA), Walrus Press and the New York Miniature Ensemble have published his writings and scores. Zachary has been an artist in resident at the Espy Foundation, Djerassi and the Headlands Center for The Arts.
Mark Wilson - Mark Wilson makes films, drawings, prints and photographs, often exploring sequential forms, such as the cylinder seal, phenakistoscope, chronophotography, comic book and animation storyboard. He studied filmmaking at the San Francisco Art Institute with Ernie Gehr, Nathainel Dorsky, Gunvor Nelson, Lawrence Jordan, and Barbara Hammer. Mark's work has exhibited at Robert Beck Memorial Cinema, San Francisco Cinematheque, Pacific Film Archives, SFMOMA, Artists' Television Access, Gallery Bergen, Kala Art Institute, Art Ark Gallery, and Great Highway Galley. Mark regularly organizes and co-curates films screenings in San Francisco and co-curated the gallery and performance exhibition Timeless Motion at SOMArts. Mark has previously collaborated on live expanded cinema pieces with composers Aaron Novik, duo B. (Lisa Mezzacappa and Jason Levis,) and Marielle Jakobsons.
Tanya Zimbardo - Tanya Zimbardo is a San Francisco-based curator. For the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Zimbardo has curated exhibitions of work by Jim Campbell, Runa Islam, Pat O’Neill, Cauleen Smith, and Kerry Tribe, and (co-)curated Speculative Portraits, Nothing Stable under Heaven, Soundtracks, and Nam June Paik: In Character, among others. Zimbardo has (co-)curated select film and video screening programs for nonprofit arts organizations and independently, including Lynn Marie Kirby: Collaborations with Etel Adnan at the Mill Valley Public Library, Barbara Hammer: Cinema of Intimacy at The Roxie, Alison O’Daniel: The Tuba Thieves at the McEvoy Foundation for the Arts, and Center of Gravity: Gunvor Nelson and Dorothy Wiley for the San Francisco Cinematheque.
The project has received funding from the California Council for the Arts and Southern Exposure.