_ MELLOWDRAMA
Courtney Smith & Ivan Navarro
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_ MELLOWDRAMA
March 7 - 15 2014
4-6 Grand Street
New York
_ An experimental and collaborative artwork between artists Courtney Smith and Iván Navarro entitled MELLOWDRAMA. A “stage” was created by Courtney Smith, illuminated by Iván Navarro and activated, occupied and transformed by the different performances, musical events and participations by the artists’ guests.
GUESTS:
Barbara Browning & Imre Lodrog
PRESS:
Musee Magazine
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OIDO III: A multifunctional, sculptural “stage” environment created by Courtney Smith, was transformed by a series of performances by Iván Navarro, Sokio, Offending Command and Recipol (Courtesy of Hueso Records.) Using bass-lines, electric guitar noise, and exploring the maximalist side of dance music. The composition of sounds contrasted with the performance and video intervention of hydrogen peroxide trickled inside the ear of one of the performers creating a sculptural response to the ephemeral electronic sounds. While earwax literally effervesces and rumbles inside the performer’s ear, the public experienced it on a large screen projection, which showed the image of the murmuring ear during the length of the performance.
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WHO THE HELL IS IMRE LODBROG? There’s a pithy description I use to describe him to friends: “He’s like Serge Gainsbourg on shrooms.”
But if I were to be a little less cheeky, and if I were to elaborate, I’d tell you what I once told Imre in an email. I said, “I was thinking about the appeal of your music and I think it's that you sound like an actor playing the role of an aging rock star, which is precisely the appeal of Leonard Cohen and Bob Dylan, not to mention Frank Sinatra and Léo Ferré...”
In this evening of music, video installation and reading, Barbara Browning will introduce Imre Lodbrog, an aging French rock star and minor - or possibly major - genius. Barbara Browning writes fiction, and Imre Lodbrog is fictional, but she didn’t make him up. Imre Lodbrog did it for her, and served himself up on a platter. Barbara Browning invited him to come from Paris to New York so she could eat him whole. In return, she offered herself as his muse, back-up singer, and “little friend.” This is their performance debut. They will also be releasing their 7” vinyl EP, with an accompanying digital disc, Imre Lodbrog et sa petite amie.
︎ listen
Courtney Smith (Paris 1966) is an American, Brazilian-raised artist currently residing in Brooklyn, New York. Her work has evolved around the concept of furniture and its metonymical relationship to human form and function. She creates complex, manipulable sculpture as “construction kits” to be endlessly reconfigured into fictional interiors. Smith has exhibited her work throughout the United States, Europe and Latin America, in galleries and museums such as PS1/MoMA, El Museo del Barrio, and The Museum of Art and Design in New York, Museo Reina Sofia in Madrid, Whilhelm-Hack Museum (Germany), Museo Sperimentale d’Arte Contemporanea (Italy), and MAM in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, among others.
Barbara Browning is a performance scholar, novelist, dancer, video maker, and amateur ukuleleist. She is the author of a couple of academic books, as well as the award-winning ficto-critical novels The Correspondence Artist and I’m Trying to Reach You, both of which entailed corresponding online performances. Her work has been described as “part memoir, part fiction, part epistolary, part metadata-existentialist philosophy, part art installation.”* Another observer hazards that “no contemporary novelist has captured the way technology has reshaped our social and erotic lives the way [she] has.
Barbara Browning is a performance scholar, novelist, dancer, video maker, and amateur ukuleleist. She is the author of a couple of academic books, as well as the award-winning ficto-critical novels The Correspondence Artist and I’m Trying to Reach You, both of which entailed corresponding online performances. Her work has been described as “part memoir, part fiction, part epistolary, part metadata-existentialist philosophy, part art installation.”* Another observer hazards that “no contemporary novelist has captured the way technology has reshaped our social and erotic lives the way [she] has.
Iván Navarro (Santiago 1972) is a Chilean-born artist based in Brooklyn, New York. Navarro’s work transcends its Minimalist roots by employing mass-produced materials to build powerfully symbolic objects that effectively infiltrate the domestic realm they mimic. His socio-politically charged sculptures in neon, fluorescent or incandescent light double as functional elements, integrated in the physical space they inhabit. His work has been shown in museums and galleries all over the world, including his participation in the 53rd Venice Biennale in 2009, and in such venues as The Hayward Gallery, London; The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington DC; MOCA Goldman Warehouse, Miami; Whitney Museum at Altria, New York; Witte de Witt, Rotterdam, Caja de Burgos, Spain, Towner Art Museum, Eastbourne UK, among many others. He is also the creator and director of the music label Hueso Records.