Chelsea Herman + Jacob Krupnick

Sunday, August 9
Admission: Free, $10 minimum
Showtime: 7pm
reservations are recommended

Cellular Sweep, by Chelsea Herman:
Cellular Sweep is an eight channel video installation that explores the aesthetic of the spill and the splatter. The extension of the single screen to many screens represents not only an expansion of visual horizons but an overwhelming intensification of visual experience. The multi-vision environments each deal with issues of scale, observation, stillness and orgranic form.

This project is all about immersion and the experience of watching. It developed after many hours of removing coffee drips and honey droppings from white counter-tops. Looking at various textures of everyday substances, the goal in its creation was to explore their movement and subtle gestures. I aimed to study the workings of substances with my lens, like studying a pre-prepared slide with a microscope. Density relationships and color swirling techniques quickly unfurl before the camera. The narration in each work emerges from the textural properties of the materials. The flickering light and glistening cellular bodies affect the viewing process.

MOVES, by Jacob Krupnick:

Dancers are instruments, like a piano the choreographer plays. -George Balanchine

There is a bit of insanity in danving that does everybody a great deal of good. -Edwin Denby.

The range of messages we express through dance is wide and uneven-- for the experienced, it might be an allegory or a gesture or a formal style. I’m more interested in the expressions of non-professional dancers, and what they convey: aspiration, uncertainty, ecstatic release, dopey glee from overcoming shyness.

I filmed fifty dancers of all levels in a space stripped of the context you’d normally find in a dance environment. Volunteers were asked to dance alone, in a wide open space, but could choose the song they moved to. I’ve recontextualized the dancers’ movements and also experimented with how different soundtracks lend new meanings to specific movements.

The main soundtrack is loosely composed from a few dancers’ original song selections. Three alternating soundtracks show that even though we dance in response to (or along with) a particular song, our movements can be fantastically interpretive of other forms of music.