Art Metropole

25 Apr. 2009

LP Release for Andrew Zealley's Themes & Variations

Artists

Andrew Zealley, Luis Jacob, Benny Nemer, Joey Medaglia, and Scott Treleaven

Time

1 pm - 3 pm

Andrew Zealley: Themes & Variations is the third installment in Zealley’s How To Explain Silence To A Dead Hare series of vinyl project editions. The album showcases selected film, video, installation and performance music by Zealley, commissioned by visual artists – including Luis Jacob, Joey Medaglia, Benny Nemerofsky Ramsay, and Scott Treleaven. Produced by Psbeuys, Themes & Variations is released on Tourette Records (USA). This vinyl-only edition of 300 numbered LP’s launches at Art Metropole on Saturday April 25, 1-3 PM.

On Themes & Variations, Zealley intersects various aspects of his sound practise: field recordings, audio art, existential house, tonal mantra, and musical form/composition. At the center of Themes & Variations are the scores for Scott Treleaven’s trilogy of short films: Gold, Silver and Lustre. Composed and produced in 2005-2006, this group of instrumental compositions is punctuated, for the album, by four thematically-related works: Apotheosis II, Habitat Theme 2, Signal_, and Arena.

Track Notes:

The score to Treleaven’s film on pandrogyny (starring Genesis P’Orridge and the late Lady Jaye Breyer), Gold‘s cycling vortex of digital and acoustic sounds is followed by two variations on the same melodic and tonal themes: Apotheosis II (an early audio sketch for Gold), and Habitat Theme 2 (developed for Luis Jacob’s Habitat installation at AGO). The plaintive love-pop electronics of Signal, originally produced for Benny Nemerofsky Ramsay’s Constellation performance piece, is newly remixed by Psbeuys for the album. The swirling dream-scape of Silver, the score to Treleaven’s homage to John Dee (starring AA Bronson), is a seemingly endless sustain of electronics, violin and bell tones. Arena, featuring the “beatbox” vocals of Luis Jacob, is the audio score to Joey Medaglia’s video Re: Form (Becoming Visible). An alternate version of Arena‘s motifs can be heard on Zealley’s exhibition soundtrack, AA Bronson School For Young Shamans. Themes & Variations concludes with the 3-part score for Lustre, Treleaven’s super8 tryptich starring Massimo & Pierce (Black Sun Productions). Here Zealley turns to a more classical interpretation of “themes and variations,” literally voicing the score’s tender melodic main theme (written for a local violin busker), through a series of pastoral string and oscillating electronic deconstructions.

Andrew Zealley: Themes & Variations is mastered for vinyl at The E Room, by Peter J. Moore, and features performances by Luis Jacob, Benny Nemerofsky Ramsay, violinist Adm Shedden, and the Psbeuys-directed Prospect Cottage Strings.

Themes & Variations is released on Tourette Records (USA), catalogue number TOURETTE009.

Themes & Variations, Andrew Zealley, Tourette Records (Houston), 2009.
33 rpm black vinyl LP with insert, 31 × 31 cm, signed/numbered edition of 300, $25.

Andrew Zealley is a Toronto-based artist whose work expands beyond audio and music methods to inform mixed disciplines and media. His practice has been situated at the shifting nexus of HIV/AIDS, queer identity, and the body since 1990. Zealley s audio installation, Nature: This Is A Recording, is in the permanent collection of the National Gallery of Canada. He has recordings published by labels Art Metropole, Fine & Dandy, How To Explain Silence To A Dead Hare, Old Europa Cafe, Public Record/Ultra-red, Tourette Records, and Vague Terrain. Zealley holds an MFA in interdisciplinary studies from OCAD University. He is currently pursuing doctoral research through the Faculty of Environmental Studies, York University; Program of Study: Safe and Sound: Art, Queer Listening, and Biopolitics of HIV/AIDS.

Luis Jacob is a Peruvian-born Toronto-based artist and curator whose work destabilizes conventions of viewing and invites a collision of meanings. He studied semiotics and philosophy at the University of Toronto. Since his participation in documenta 12, Kassel, 2007, he has achieved an international reputation with exhibitions at venues such as: Museum der Moderne Salzburg, 2019; Württembergischer Kunstverein Stuttgart, 2019; Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, 2018; Museion Bolzano, 2017; La Biennale de Montréal, 2016; Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York City, 2015; Taipei Biennial, 2012; Generali Foundation, Vienna, 2011; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York City, 2010; Kunstverein in Hamburg, 2008; and Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery, 2008.

Benny Nemer (b. 1973) is a Montreal-born artist and diarist.

Since 2000 his creative gestures in video, sound and text have contemplated the history of song, the rendering of love and emotion into language, and the resurrection and manipulation of voices – sung, spoken or screamed. Early video work concentrated on critical mimicry of material from popular culture, with references to Madonna, American Idol, Tatu, Françoise Hardy and Kylie Minogue. Recent work focuses on re-examinations of seminal texts, films and video art from queer and art history, working with material by Audre Lorde, Colin Campbell, Rosa von Praunheim, Henri Rousseau and Harry Hay.

Nemer’s work has screened in festivals and galleries across Canada, Europe and East Asia and has won prizes at the Hamburg Short Film Festival, the Kasseler Dokumentarfilm und Videofest and the Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen (all in Germany), the Toronto Inside Out Film and Video Festival as well as first prize at the Globalica Media Arts Biennale in WrocÅ‚aw, Poland. His work is part of numerous private collections as well as the permanent collection of the National Gallery of Canada.

(from wikipedia)

Images

1: Overseas guest Josephine with Julie Voyce, Ann Unger and Enoch Gray.
2: Keith Cole, Andrew Patterson, Daryl Vocat, Andrew Zealley.
3: John O'Regan, Julie Voyce.
4: Guest with Andrew Zealley.
5: Friends surrounding Andrew Zealley.
6: Guests enjoying the treats and works.
7: David Craig and other guests looking at the stock.

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