LMAKseries PRESENTS:

Blake Carrington
Nick Hallett & Brock Monroe 

Monday, February 14 at 7.30 pm
Location: 139 Eldridge Street, Between Delancey and Broome

Suggestion donation of $7.-

Blake Carrington, Is Space, 6-channel sound piece

Nick Hallett & Brock Monroe 

In LMAKprojects’ aim to integrate film, video, sound art, and media performance into the gallery’s mission and its vision of the contemporary landscape, LMAKseries is pleased to present the performances by Blake Carrington and Nick Hallett & Brock Monroe on Monday, February 14, 2011.

Blake Carrington created a piece, Is Space particularly for the space. He will place six speakers throughout and under the architecture of the gallery, complicating the spatial experience for long and narrow venue. Smoothed-out loops of field recordings are converted to staccato beats by custom sequencers, resulting in polyrhythms that move around the space, falling in and out of sync with each other. Henri Lefebvre’s quote “people don’t act in space, peoples’ actions define space” influenced the piece conceptually. In a similar fashion, this piece intends to create a negotiation between the physical space of performance and a perceived sonic topography.

Nick Hallett & Brock Monroe present a work-in-development in celebration of Valentine’s Day,Threeway:  for Xenia, a LectureOpera on the subject of composer and percussionist Xenia Kashevaroff, married to John Cage from 1935 to 1945, but also lover of and nude model for photographer Edward Weston, and muse to comparative mythologist, Joseph Campbell.  Fabled for her erotic nature (Cage described her “most delightfully unmoral, pagan”), Kashevaroff casts an interesting light onto the legacy of John Cage and his noted collaboration in life and art with Merce Cunningham, with whom she and Cage shared a threeway sexual encounter that would, in effect, transform the landscape of experimental music.  Playing with strategies its creators call “skinematic,” the piece integrates aleatoric procedures, graphic notation, and an homage to the analog electronic soundtracks of classic softcore pulp sex films, all on equal footing.  


Blake Carrington (b. 1980) operates within the spheres of the sound, visual and media arts.  His work in all of these forms is informed largely by cultural geography, landscape and architecture.  The areas between these formalized spatial practices and the experiential qualities of sound and visual art practice are the main focus of his work. He received a NYSCA grant in support of his debut CD release concert to be held at the Basilica of St. Patrick’s Old Cathedral on March 3. In the Spring Carrington will be artist-in-residence at Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Swing Space on Governors Island, and currently Carrington is writing a piece for the Princeton Laptop Orchestra.

In addition to his work in sound and video, he also creates hi-res digital prints from custom Max/MSP/Jitter patches.  His print series Loci_, exploring the questionable translation of field recordings to abstract landscape imagery,is in The Drawing Center’s Viewing Program in New York.  Blake was born in Indiana and currently lives and works in Brooklyn

Nick Hallett is a NYC-based composer, vocalist, and cultural producer. His first opera, a collaboration with video artist Shana Moulton, was performed at the Kitchen and the New Museum.  His music has also been performed at Joe’s Pub, ISSUE Project Room,The Kitchen, Le Poisson Rouge, and The Stone. Nick held the first RE:NEW RE:PLAY artist residency at the New Museum in May 2009 and his work was included in the Performa 07 and Performa 09 biennials. After organizing a performance for the Joshua Light Show at the Kitchen in 2007, Hallett became its music curator, and will soon compose original music for the project. With Zach Layton, he co-directs the celebrated Darmstadt new music series at ISSUE Project Room. As a vocalist, he has performed the works of Anthony Braxton, Susie Ibarra, and Meredith Monk, among others. From 2000 to 2003, he led the band Plantains, a new wave-cabaret act incorporating electronic music and video, collaborating with Ray Sweeten and Seth Kirby, a recent retrospective of which was released in 2010 on I, Absentee.

Brock Monroe is a live cinema artist and designer.  In collaboration with the Joshua Light Show and Mighty Robot A/V Squad, Brock has created visuals at Abrons Arts Center, The Kitchen, PS1, Lincoln Center Out of Doors, Brooklyn Academy of Music, Netmage festival (Bologna), Aurora Picture Show’s Media Archeology festival (Houston), Monkey Town, ISSUE Project Room, and Secret Project Robot. His last collaboration with Nick Hallett occurred in May 2009 at the New Museum as part of the RE:NEW RE:PLAY series.

LMAKseries is curated by Richard Garet and Louky Keijsers Koning in consultation with Berlin-based artist Andy Graydon