7:30pm Doors / 8pm Performances
$10 Guests / Free for members
Reserve seats: member login or guest registration

Wizard Apprentice is an independent electronic music producer, motion graphics and live performance artist. As a highly-sensitive introvert, her multimedia projects are strategies for energetically managing an overwhelming world. Her music is a combination of lyrical precision, minimalistic composition, and technically amateurish charm. She creates digitally-based media that takes advantage of accessible, user-friendly technology; allowing her to skip time consuming learning curves and get straight to focusing on inventing personalized yet highly relatable language for deeply subtle and internal experiences. She's not a gear-head, rather, a digital folk artist who vividly and simplistically expresses her inner world using resourcefulness and honesty. Her video work incorporates green screen graphics, digital puppetry, and minimalistic compositing to produce imagery that’s cerebral, campy, and hypnotic. She combines song and video to create multimedia live performances that explore intimate emotional themes ranging from the challenges/triumphs of being an empath to overstimulation in the Internet Age. url-gurl.com

Julius Smack is the stage persona of Peter Hernandez, an American musician and performer whose work philosophizes technology and modernity. In addition to music production and keyboard performance, he composes scores for woodwind and vocal ensembles, which is performed as Julius Smack Ensemble. His performances feature dance and theater segments integrating heightened drama, pedestrian movement, and vogue dance. His discography includes solo and collaborative releases on Los Angeles-based Practical Records, which he directs as a shared context for performance and music releases by American queer, transgender, and POC communities. He performs in spaces ranging from institutions to farm stands to queer dance clubs. His work has been presented at Hammer Museum, The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA, the historic Aunt Charlie’s Lounge in San Francisco, Zebulon, Trans-Pecos, Human Resources, and Rogaland Kunstsenter in Stavanger, Norway. juliussmack.com

Madalyn Merkey is a composer and performer of live computer music based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her recent work observes the principles of acoustic instruments and material spaces to design real-time sound synthesis programs for site-specific performances. In 2015, Merkey translated the pioneer electronic music text, Due scuole di musica elettronica in Italia (1968) by composer Enore Zaffiri (b. Turin, 1928), from Italian to English. She first realized the audio portion of Zaffiri’s projects at Mills College in 2014 as part of her MFA thesis in Electronic Music. She then completed further research at the Conservatorio di Musica Luigi Cherubini in Florence, Italy. madalynmerkey.bandcamp.com/

6:30 pm, doors open at 6 pm
Free

In his sculptures, photographs, and films, the work of Swiss artist Shahryar Nashat often addresses the representation of the body and the conventions of mediation and presentation. Nashat finds great pleasure in details, and his works—with their near-obsessive methods of framing and cropping—draw the viewer into a world of clandestine forms, artful gestures, and posturing. His work has been exhibited widely, including the Kunsthalle Basel (2017); Rubell Family Collection, Miami (2017); Portikus, Frankfurt (2016); Schinkel Pavilion, Berlin (2016); Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2016); 356 Mission Road, Los Angeles (2015); and Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, Harvard University, Cambridge (2015). He took part in the 20th Sydney Biennale (2016); La Biennale de Montréal (2016); the 8th Berlin Biennale (2014); and the 54th Venice Biennale (2011). Nashat is represented by David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles, and Rodeo Gallery, London. He is currently based in Los Angeles.

Immersive exhibitions that stimulate multiple senses—hearing, seeing, tasting, touching, even smelling—are common in contemporary art today. Museums, galleries, biennials, and art fairs are presenting work by artists who interweave objects, images, texts, sound, video, and performance into dense, enveloping environments. These presentations physically implicate viewers in orchestrated situations, both inside and outside the institution, where art and ideas coalesce through the direct experience of space and time. Often complex in the making, the work requires artists and their studios to corral a range of skilled resources to produce something well beyond the expertise and confines of an artist’s studio.

This development speaks to the changing characteristics of the artist figure—manager and artistic director, negotiator and administrator—in reaction to expectations of art institutions and audiences who crave more experiential engagement with contemporary art.

Experience It is a conversation series about this shift. In dialogue with visiting artists, the series examines, among other things, the social and architectural conditions of an exhibition site. The format includes conversations between each artist and curator and art historian James Voorhies, as well as viewings of film clips, performances, and images of their work. Experience It aims to reveal why artists choose their given artistic approaches, how institutions support them, and how they imagine their audiences as integral to the art, ultimately arriving at a better understanding of the “it” in the work.