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The Lost Lectures

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In partnership with Hyperallergic, The Lost Lectures presented 6 world-class speakers, performances, interactive demos and art installations.

The evening’s lineup featured musical sensation Blood Orange (aka Dev Hynes), writer and publisher Choire Sicha (of The Awl), photographer Barbara Nitke, scientist Marc Abrahams, and Brooklyn dance sensations Flex Is Kings + filmmaker Deidre Schoo.

For more information on the speakers, visit the The Lost Lectures.

Red Bull Music Academy Presents: Hardcore Activity

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Presented by Red Bull Music Academy, Hardcore Activity presented a sampling of the most extreme recording artists in jazz, techno, metal, noise, classical, hip hop and beyond.

Artists included:
Kranky’s ambient prince Tim Hecker
Grindcore legends Napalm Death
Gunplay – the Maybach rapper with a Bible on the dash
Scandinavian free jazzers The Thing all feature
Wolf Eyes, Regis, Bastard Noise, Lubomyr Melnyk, Skullflower, Joe McPhee/Chris Corsano, Okkyung Lee, Clipping, Yoshiko Ohara, Reg Bloor, and Gnaw, with visuals provided by Nuit Blanche.

Choreography

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Created for the vaulted, panoramic structure of The Knockdown Center, choreographer Michou Szabo premiered a new evening length dance work that re-imagined and exhausted a single strand of movement from Szabo’s The Wild Heart (2012) in four distinct movements.

Choreography displayed the work of Nic Petry- Video Deisgn, Bobby McElver- Composer and Sound Design, and Joe Levasseur- Lighting Design.

“I believe in movement
I believe in form
I believe in shifting
I believe in standing still
I believe in swollen
I believe in love
I believe in turbulent swirls
I believe in empty
I believe in the human body
I believe in choreography”
-Michou Szabo

Traysh New York

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TRAYSH NEW YORK, an urban extension of TRAYSH ISLAND, brought together emerging multimedia/musical artists and legendary talents for one night only.

For nearly ten years, musicians and artists have been gathering at Harold Arts, now 8550 OHIO, in Chesterhill, Ohio to raise awareness for the development of its growing sculpture park through a multimedia/music festival called TRAYSH ISLAND.

Artists Included:
R Stevie Moore
Jody
DonChristian
Little Band of Sailors
Xenia Rubinos
Jimmy Whispers
Alta Vida
jaytram

Supporting Cast Included:
Molten Death
VHVL
Living Things
Leblaze
Rowan

Maspeth’s World of Wheels Auto Show Extravaganza

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On June 21, Knockdown Center presented a full­ spectrum look at the automobile as our nation’s long standing symbol of manifest destiny and superfluous ingenuity. Set amidst three acres of parking lot, gallery, blackbox, and warehouse, M­aspeth’s World of Wheels took this undeniable American obsession to its illogical conclusion featuring an impressive array of high­ end custom and collectible cars in conversation with automobile­ inspired visual art. Complementing the landscape were the sights, sounds and smells typically associated with a state fair including: fried things, metal/psych rock bands, burnt rubber, sledge hammers hitting steel, charcoal grills, pirate radio and more!

KDC Summer Jamboree

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A family oriented FREE event with 24′ tall inflatable slide, 40′ inflatable bouncy obstacle course, face painting, treats, Ms. Nina doing a sing a long for Kiddies, Jeff Picker and his Bluegrass Band, scavenger hunt, dunk tank, carnival games, and more!

Regina Rex: House, What’s Your Crime?

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An exhibition curated by the collectively run gallery, Regina Rex.

Taking on the notion that living quarters, work places, or exhibition venues such as the Knockdown Center could have their own agency and voice, James Cordas, Leeza Meksin and Jeff Williams worked with the building to generate works specifically for this occasion. Jeff Williams’ undulating wall piece made from expanded metal flocked with nylon fibers spaned a fifty foot wall, slipping from manmade material into the realm of natural phenomenon—a process that could be seen to mirror the building’s own arc over time. Leeza Meksin stretched sheer fabrics across an isolated section of the architecture, interrogating the structure by highlighting its mutability and permeability. James Cordas used the wind power from an industrial strength fan found on site to generate work that accepts the unpredictable character of the light, sound and body of the cavernous space. Together, the works featured in House, What is Your Crime? spoke to the possibility for placing authorship and active willpower in the hands of the building itself while in dialogue with its artists and inhabitants.

¹The title is borrowed from a line in the poem “House & Bernadette” by Bernadette Mayer from the book Scarlet Tanager. In this poem, the poet holds a conversation with her apartment. The poem begins with the question: “B: House are you anyone who could be doing anything at this moment? Are you a boy watching train tracks in the past standing in a big yellow field?”

Transient’s Theme

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Presented in four movements throughout Knockdown Center’s galleries and main spaces, TRANSIENT’S THEME was Bethany Ides’ month-long, soapoperatic document of the trans-temporal, polymorphic exploits of the work’s protagonist, The Transient.

The Transient is a restless spirit who flits between presences & poleis, perpetrators & victims of hysteria, histrionics, conspicuous communitarianism & tele-para-pseudo-phones. As the Transient attempts to blend in, its movements–– modal shifts–– become the only way to detect it. You might see a rustling in & among bodies, escaping & undoing things, in disguise as a gallery opening, an academic conference or a project fundraiser. It is sneaking, nobody suspects a thing until it’s been piped in through the air vents & it’s everywhere, this sudden strangeness. Whose shadow is this? Detective? For all I can tell there’s no such thing as repetition, only this insistent, persistent rhythm.

The month-long opera was presented in four movements:

ACT I: Causing It
An exhibition curated by Andrew Beccone & Pierre Alexandre de Looz
“MYMEOGRAPH” by Pierre Alexandre De Looz and Andrew Beccone and DEUX VACANCES by Tim
Simonds Exhibition/Installation
The work irrigates Knockdown’s accessible and inaccessible spaces, with no interest in productivity- babble and dribble.
ACT III: Conference is Transference
A conference organized w/ Mitchell Akiyama
ACT IV: Traumathon
A fundraising festival

Performance Voyage 4

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Produced by Artists’ Association MUU, Performance Voyage is an annual tour of international video performances. The Performance Voyage 4 compilation from 2014 contained 14 video performances by artists from all over the world. The tour produced over 20 events in 14 different countries.

The theme of Performance Voyage 4 was SELF-PORTRAIT, offering a variety of possibilities for the artists as well as the audience: the works challenged spectators to reflect upon their own self as well. Jury members for the Performance Voyage 4 included Taina Erävaara, Leena Kela and Timo Soppela.

ARTISTS & WORKS:
Anastasia Ax & Marja-Leena Sillanpää: Scream to Scream (Sweden)
Alex Bodea: nine line poems of alex bodea (Romania/Germany)
Elina Brotherus: Francesca Woodman’s Aunts (Finland)
Cristian Chironi: Sticker (excerpt) (Italy)
Chun Hua Catherine Dong: When I Was Born (China/Canada)
Allison Halter: Salt Lick (USA/Germany)
Constantin Hartenstein: FIT (Germany)
Marja Helander: Trambo (Finland)
Marianne Myungah Kim: Remember everything (Korea/USA)
Verica Kovacevska: The Artist (Macedonia/Switzerland)
Julia Kurek: Message (Poland)
Marika Orenius: Talking about… (Finland)
Benas Šarka: Wall Soul (Lithuania)
Minna Suoniemi: Lullaby (Finland)
The Exhibition in MUU Gallery (April 2014) included also an Installation by Romulo Banares: Feed me back (Spain).

past present futures

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Showcased in an evening of performances presented by NYPAC, the New York Performance Artists Collective, past present futures was an experimental presentation curated by Samuel Draxler: over three performances, temporal borders were broken and the seam between times were blurred.

Pierre de Fermat, writing a note in the margin of Diophantus’ Arithmetica in 1637, claimed to have discovered “a truly marvelous proof… which this margin is too narrow to contain.” The historical record is insufficient to verify whether Fermat had actually solved the problem, or if the statement was pure bravado. Scientific methodology, like that of an archeological excavation, allows a form of history to be reconstructed — “now” being a fog that slowly overwhelms access to an unmediated past. The recovered materials, as relics of another time, yield certain information about their production. This information is recovered in spite of its present context. This friction between times is what happens when past and present speak at one another, when they misrecognize each other, when the borders collapse under extravagant claims and counterfactuals, when ghosts brag of feats and historians get their hands dirty. Fictive archeology, mysticism and the occult, ritualized action: these conflicting methods each connect with the present by narrating the past.

For past present futures, Meredith Neuman reprised Witch-hunting: What’s In It For Me?, guiding the audience through the identification and elimination of witches that hide amongst us (no previous experience necessary). Sara Grace Powell lead the audience on a paranormal walking tour along the site’s absent infrastructure. The evening culminated in Ashley’s presentation of an excerpt from KIDNAP ME, a mix of dance, performance, and live drawing that constitutes an “experiment in duration.”

past present futures was held in collaboration with And The Villagers Never Liked You Anyway, an exhibition and archeological survey conducted by Sorry Archive under the direction of Dr. Ulf Hueber.

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