When: Saturday September 17 2022
Time: 6:00 pm doors | 7:00 pm salon
Location: Chelsea, NY, 10011
For our first 2022 autumn salon, we showcased artistic collaborators Kamari Carter and Julian Day—otherwise known as C/D—who presented a live performance of their updated work To Be Held.
Their collaboration began in 2020 when they met at an art residency at Wave Farm in upstate New York. In this audio-visual collaboration, Carter responded to the glowing words manifesting on several LED scrolling signs activated by Day in real time. The evening was moderated by curator and writer Barbara London.
Kamari Carter’s richly ambient live score stems from compositions completed by the artist throughout 2020, which were interwoven with digital recordings of friends and family from his personal archive of voicemails during the time of the pandemic. While Day’s multichromatic text-based visuals, flashing across custom LED panel boxes, combines “conflictual political, protest, and pandemic-related rhetoric” with personal confessions, paraphrased Fluxus scores and snatches of long-forgotten films.
C/D is a New York-based artist-duo comprising Kamari Carter (born in Los Angeles) and Julian Day (born in Bendigo, Australia). C/D examined the social and ethical complexities embedded within systems of gentrification, surveillance, state violence and the mis/use of public space. They typically excavate, paraphrase, and manifest historical records and contemporary materials to draw hidden narratives to the surface, using subtle and overt sonic and light-based tactics within a broadly neo-minimalist framework. Through this, they aim to open up complexities around the ethics of broadcast, sous/surveillance and narrative-building.
C/D’s first work Blissville (2020) at The Plaxall Gallery used sculpted LED and video to critique untapped contradictions of gentrification in Long Island City, in which heavy-handed governance has destabilized residents of the titular forgotten triangle of land and brought them into dispute with the unhoused.
Their follow up Time Piece/(I Want) To Be Held (2021) at High Line Nine again featured LED and electronic sound to address misalignments in public speech within 2020/21’s unique convergence of racial protests, pandemic responses, and political upheaval.
The work presented, was the result of an artist residency at Wave Farm were both of them met, they developed an hour-long radio program that investigates, and satirizes, both radio and the police by treating widely-shared Body Worn Camera footage as product, witness, and defense.
Bios
Kamari Carter
Kamari Carter is a producer, performer, sound designer and installation artist primarily working with sound and found objects. Carter’s practice circumvents materiality and familiarity through a variety of recording and amplification techniques to investigate notions such as space, systems of identity, oppression, control and surveillance. Driven by the probative nature of perception and concepts drawn from social science, he seeks to expand narrative structures through sonic stillness. Carter’s work has been presented at such venues as MoMA, Mana Contemporary, RISD Museum, Microscope Gallery, Lenfest Center for the Arts and Wave Hill and has featured in a range of major publications including ArtNet, Precog Magazine, Level Ground and Whitewall. Carter holds a BFA in music technology from California Institute of the Arts and an MFA in sound art from Columbia University.
www.kamaricarter.com
Julian Day
Julian Day is an artist, composer and writer/broadcaster whose deep material engagement with sound, as a social and civic practice, reveals hidden power dynamics by stealth. Their work crosses several disciplines, incorporating performance, sculpture, installation, video and text. After studying composition, Day began presenting new music programs for Australia’s public radio network ABC, with appearances on the BBC, interviewing countless artists from Laurie Anderson to Ryoji Ikeda. Day has since focused on their own artistic practice, presenting work at Tate Modern, Whitechapel Gallery, Royal Academy of Music, Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, Jewish Museum, Fridman Gallery, Bang on a Can, MATA, Orange County Museum of Art, Sydney Opera House, Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art and Queensland Art Gallery of Modern Art. Day studied at Columbia University.
www.julianday.com
Barbara London
Barbara London is a New York-based curator and writer specializing in new media and sound art. She is best known for founding the video exhibition and collection programs at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). Her current projects include the book Video/Art: The First Fifty Years (Phaidon: 2000), the ongoing podcast series “Barbara London Calling”, and the exhibition “Seeing Sound” (Independent Curators International, 2020-26).