"Unique Places of Death" Installation at Bogart Salon, September 14-16

Our work for the Hart Island Project Node of City Drift Bushwick is up as an installation at Bogart Salon through Tuesday, September 18. It features five wall pieces (consisting of paintings on vellum and debris assemblages) for each of five “unique places of death” we visited between Friday night and Saturday morning, a 37-minute stereo sound collage (playing as a loop) made of sounds recorded during those same visits, and a bonus painting of Chris on the phone to AAA at midnight after we realized we had a dead car battery.

Further documentation of the installation and its makings is forthcoming.

In the meantime, please visit Bogart Salon and check out the piece (alongside the other elements of the Hart Island Node, including work by Melinda Hunt, Stefan Eins, Catherine Wald, Pamela Matsuda-Dunn, Larry Dunn, Leonora Loeb, Andy Monk, and Lisa Kahane).

Our piece will be visitable at the Bogart Salon from Friday, September 14 through Sunday, September 16, noon to 6pm.

Bogart Salon
56 Bogart Street
Bushwick, New York 11206

Unique Places of Death. A Collaboration with the Hart Island Project as part of Citydrift, September 7-9, 2012.

At Momenta Art and Bogart Salon, 56 Bogart, Bushwick, Brooklyn.

Floating in the Long Island Sound not far from City Island in the Bronx, Hart Island is the largest cemetery in the United States and has been New York City’s potter’s field for over 150 years. More than 850,000 people have been buried there in unmarked mass graves, including the poor, the anonymous, and infants of parents without the means for a more dignified funeral. The island and its inhabitants exist in a cartographic and administrative limbo that has made the site illegal to visit and the exact locations of individual graves nearly impossible to determine. The Hart Island Project is a nonprofit foundation that was founded to make the site visible, and to remember the people buried there. It advocates on behalf of the families of the deceased, and successfully sued the City for access to the burial records, which it has now painstakingly made available in a database on its website.

During our 2010 project Reading Governors Island we met Melinda Hunt, the director of the Hart Island Project, and began conversations about a potential collaboration. We are thrilled to report that it is about to happen.

The Hart Island Project has invited us to participate in Citydrift, a collaborative 3-day exploration and recontextualization of the urban environment. Our contribution will be to visit and document “unique places of death,” locations around New York City outside of hospitals or other institutions that witnessed the death of people now buried on Hart Island. At these locations we will gather sounds, visual impressions, and objects and then return to the Citydrift headquarters at 56 Bogart, where we will assemble the results into a mixed media performance and installation. Our goal will be to reveal remarkable things in otherwise unremarkable locations as we contribute to the Hart Island Project’s efforts to expose repressed histories and remember the forgotten. We hope both to honor the lost citizens of New York associated with our selected locations, and to present opportunities to consider the highly provisional factors that separate us all from a similar fate.

The event begins with an opening on Friday September 7 from 7:00-9:00 PM at Momenta Art, located at 56 Bogart Street, a focal point of the arts in Bushwick, Brooklyn. The gallery will be open for 72 hours, during which we will assemble our installation. Many other artists will be participating in Citydrift, so there will lots to see, including panel discussions and talks on Saturday and Sunday. We’ll post more information about the schedule in the coming weeks.

We’re extremely excited for this opportunity and hope that you will stop by.

Unique Places of Death
A Collaboration with the Hart Island Project
Citydrift, September 7-9, 2012
Momenta Art and Bogart Salon, both at 56 Bogart, Bushwick, Brooklyn.

Performance: March 10, 2012 at The Old Stone House, with Ranjit Bhatnagar, Andrea Williams, and Dan Joseph

We’ll be performing on Saturday, March 10, 2012 at 8:00pm, at The Old Stone House in Park Slope Brooklyn, alongside Ranjit Bhatnagar, Andrea Williams, and Dan Joseph.

Admission is $5-10 sliding scale. BYOB.

“The artists will perform in various combinations and pairings.”

The Old Stone House is in the middle of J.J. Byrne Park, between Third and Fourth Streets and Fourth and Fifth Avenues. The official adress is 336 Third Street

Performance: The Privatization of Desire. Live at 19ths Loft, on May 12, 2011 · posted 1 July 2011

Personnel: Chris Williams, Jason Das

Download

mp3 (14:28)

Nord Lead II, bass guitar, Sonic Wire, excerpts of Rebecca Solnit and Peter Coyote in conversation, field recordings, Bloom, pre-recorded piano, delay, etc.

See also: Rebecca Solnit’s A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster

Other performers (all recommended) that night were Hey Exit, Hora Flora, and sometime Glass Bee Andrea Williams.

Eagle Rock · posted 5 April 2011

Personnel: Chris Williams, Jason Das

Download

mp3 (9:07)

field recordings, bass guitar, Nord Lead II, Bloom, delay, etc.