Tuesday, October 13, 2009 at 7:30pm
Lucky Dragons + Rose Lowder
In DIY solidarity, Light Industry hosts a benefit for Showpaper. Printed bi-weekly and distributed for free around town, the broadsheet lists all-ages shows in New York and the tri-state area, promoting events that might otherwise slip under the radar—a lineup of bands playing a Jersey City basement will appear in Showpaper, if nowhere else. Each issue also boasts full-color spreads by the likes of Brian Chippendale, Ben Jones, and Raymond Pettibon, making it both concert guide and take-home gallery.
Tonight, LA-based electronic outfit Lucky Dragons, whose participatory performances jam 21st century musique concrète with the fervor of a tent revival, will play around and variously in dialog with five films by Rose Lowder, a leading light of French experimental cinema. Rigorously composed through single-frame 16mm shooting and elaborate in-camera editing, her work creates complex and rhythmic explorations of perception and its limits. The evening will play digital against analog, silence against noise, and promises to be a heady a/v experience.
“It’s a simple formula, and a magnificent idea: a huge list of all-ages d.i.y. shows, absurdist horoscopes, a hipster-kid ‘I saw you’ section and consistently rad artwork printed every two weeks and distributed to coffee shops/venues/etc. to keep your broke (possibly underage?) ass in the loop.” — Arthur
"Lucky Dragons create ecstatic music that completely transcends genres. My attempts to describe what their music actually sounds like always fall short of the magic they are making. I guess you could say it sounds like—ecstatic magic. Challenging stereotypes that electronic music is cold and sterile, Lucky Dragons' live show, though conducted via computers, is a truly great celebration of the human spirit, giving real hope for the techno-future our society is racing toward." — Artforum
Lucky Dragons live in Los Angeles, California and have recorded 19 albums which are all available for downloading. They keep a busy schedule of performances and visits and festivals and workshops and things, in the present, and in the past: the 2008 Whitney Biennial, NY's PS1, the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, the Philadelphia Institute for Contemporary Art, the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, Frankfurt's Schirn Kunsthalle, Los Angeles' The Smell, NY's The Kitchen, The Smithsonian Institute's Hirshorn Museum, Cooper Union, the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, etc.
"I trained as a painter and sculptor in Lima, Peru, then in London. I worked for a decade as an artist while earning a living as a film editor. I became interested in research in film from 1977 onwards, establishing with Alain-Alcide Sudre a non-profit organization, the Experimental Film Archives of Avignon. The Archives have become a collection of 16mm films as well as a paper document collection. The first is made available to the public with films rented from other sources by means of annual screenings and the second can be consulted freely as a reference library. At one point I wrote a doctoral dissertation entitled 'The Experimental Film as an Instrument for Visual Research' I also teach a filmmaking course at the Sorbonne, Paris, with the grand title of Associate Professor.
Although I began filmmaking by pursuing concerns common to other contemporary art practices, my attention was rapidly attracted by a twofold feature of the photographic procedure which allows one to handle the content and the form of the material while the process inscribes automatically some of the traces and characteristics of the reality being recorded. This paradox led me to study perception, the possibilities and problematics of research in art as well as how theoretical approaches to experimental film and traditional cinema have evolved. Underlying these studies is a search for meaningful ways to work with film regarding our contemporary society controlled by multinational economics. As the totalitarian environments of urban landscapes become more and more uninhabitable, I seek, against the grain in our 'virtual' space age it seems, a more human physical home." - RL
Tickets $5 - $20, sliding scale, available at door