ONE CYCLE AHEAD

Opening performance: Friday, January 2, 6-8pm
Performance: Friday, January 9, 7-9pm
Closing performance: Friday, January 16, 8-10pm

CONVERSATION 01 (between the artists)
REVIEW (Hyperallergic)
 

JB: I cannot take one of your sounds and just wrap it in leather!
DN: Oh, I would love to watch the attempt.

Wave Farm and Fridman Gallery present ONE CYCLE AHEAD a collaborative solo exhibition by Daniel Neumann and Juan Betancurth.

In this collaborative installation with objects and sound, artists Juan Betancurth and Daniel Neumann explore the overlap & the consequences between their significantly different individual practices. Neumann’s intermedia practice is mostly focused on sound, sound material and its modulation through space with temporal operations. Betancurth's mixed media works act as loaded metaphors, provoking the viewers' intimate desires to come to the surface as they decode each object.

In ONE CYCLE AHEAD, Neumann provides functioning speaker relics, while Betancurth applies his unique sensibility towards found materials and his ability to set found objects into an ambiguous ontological space. Re-staging and re-articulating each piece through sonic and spatial arrangements, their objects create an atmospherically charged installation that neither of the two could have predicted. It is sonically immersive, the objects are organically interrelated and with most of the sounds created on site, the artists are demonstrating a more spontaneous practice. By pushing intuitively forward rather than materializing a pre-existing idea, they retain this feeling that the work they are producing is always ONE CYCLE AHEAD of their understanding of it.

Three performance events are scheduled throughout the exhibition. A special edition catalog will document the process of the collaboration. 

This project is made possible with funds from the Media Arts Assistance Fund, a regrant program of the New York State Council on the Arts, Electronic Media and Film, with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature; administered by Wave Farm.

ABOUT THE COLLABORATION:

After spending a month in residency at the Queens Museum of Art in September 2013, Juan Betancurth had invited Daniel Neumann to collaborate on an intimate performance installation inside his studio. Neumann had been collecting speaker objects, which were selected and spatially arranged by Betancurth with the moment of acoustic action in mind. An important consideration was to choose and present the objects in a way that they enter an ontological space that is ambivalent, so that the objects won't easily reveal themselves as just loudspeakers, but gain potential meaning in other directions. During the performance “The Moment of Taking Shape” on October 10, 2013 at 11:59pm – while the museum was still under construction towards its re-opening in November – Daniel Neumann was activating the found transducers to create a new sense of space - physically, perceptually, energetically, emotionally. (A transducer is a device that converts one form of energy into another.) The multi-channel recordings of the performance then became the permanent installation that was presented on multiple weekends leading to and including the re-opening of the Museum.