Sunday, March 12, 2023
7:30 pm doors / 8pm performance
Free / donations accepted: RSVP Here
PLEASE NOTE: Due to the continued cleanup of an oil leak in the Redstone Building's basement, The Lab is still not safe for visitors. Our friends at Southern Exposure, 3030 20th Street, San Francisco, CA 94110, have agreed to host. Please meet us there for the show!
Celebrating the release of Tom Comitta’s debut novel, The Nature Book, out on March 14 from Coffee House Press, Comitta and Kota Ezawa will present a multimedia performance, blending a live reading from the novel with a multi-channel projection of Ezawa’s video City of Nature (2011), a rotoscoped animation collaging nature scenes from dozens of classic movies.
Originally inspired by Ezawa’s video and hailed in a starred Kirkus review as “a magnum opus,” The Nature Book similarly brings background content to the fore: the book collects nature descriptions from 300 novels and collages them into a single, seamless narrative. To write it, Comitta searched for patterns in how hundreds of authors behold, distort, and anthropomorphize nature and gathered them into a single book that lives somewhere between narrative and archive, lyrical excess and data analysis. The novel follows hundreds of animals, plants, landforms, and weather patterns through the four seasons, oceans, islands, outer space, prairies, mountains, and deserts.
Ezawa’s City of Nature, which was commissioned by Madison Square Park (NYC), has been exhibited at the Headlands Center and a dozen museums across the U.S. and internationally. The video moves seamlessly from one subject to another: the river of Fitzcarraldo cuts to the river of Deliverance, which cuts to the river of Rambo, which flows to sea of Swept Away, which cuts to the sea of The Old Man and The Sea, and so on. Under the smooth and steady hand of Ezawa’s rotoscoping technique, these nature shots become abstracted, forming a meditation on the politics and poetics of framing and flattening the world into images.
Tom Comitta is the author of The Nature Book, published on March 14 by Coffee House Press. Their other books include 〇 (Ugly Duckling Presse), Airport Novella (Troll Thread), and First Thought Worst Thought: Collected Books 2011–2014 (Gauss PDF), a print and digital archive of forty “night novels,” art books, and poetry collections. In 2015, Royal Nonesuch Gallery installed these books in a multimedia exhibition containing drawings, video, vinyl window installation, and a sound poetry computer program. Comitta’s fiction and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in WIRED, Lit Hub, Electric Literature, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Kenyon Review, BOMB, Joyland, The Brooklyn Rail, and BAX: Best American Experimental Writing 2020. They live in Brooklyn.
Kota Ezawa’s work has been showcased in solo exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Santa Barbara, CA; SITE Santa Fe, NM; Mead Art Museum, Amherst, MA; Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, VA; Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY; Vancouver Art Gallery, Canada; and St. Louis Art Museum, MO; and group exhibitions at Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid, Spain; Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane, Australia; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; and Art Institute of Chicago, IL; among many others. He participated in the Whitney Biennial 2019 and the Shanghai Biennale 2004.