EXHIBITION ON VIEW: June 29 – July 20, 2019
OPENING RECEPTION & PERFORMANCES:
Saturday, June 29, 6:30-8:30 pm
Outdoor performance: 6:30 p.m.
Indoor performance: 8:00 p.m.
GALLERY HOURS
Saturday, July 6, 1-5pm
Saturday, July 13, 1-5pm
Saturday, July 20,
4 pm until closing performance event from 7:30 to 9:30 pm
featuring van der Rohe (C. Tara & David Gladden), Jeremy Ray, and Dura (Mattson Ogg)
Civilian Art Projects is thrilled to present C. Tara & David Gladden, ELECTRONIC MEDITATIONS—an exhibition of electronic media, site-specific installation, and performance that creates an immersive, synesthetic, audiovisual environment within the gallery space. The exhibition is presented by Civilian Art Projects in residence at Studio 1469 (1469R Harvard St NW Rear) in the Columbia Heights neighborhood of Washington, DC.
C. Tara and David Gladden have a wide-ranging, multi-layered practice that includes video, sound, animation, performance, installation, photography, collage, and sculpture. Their projects take on many different forms to explore various conceptual ideas, histories, and a multitude of contemporary issues, while navigating ontologies of humanity, spirituality, and identity.
According to the artists, “Our works are often ritualistic, durational, poetic, and experiential. Whether filming performance actions in natural environments, composing 3D animations, forming immersive environments, creating interactive media performances, or sculpting objects that present new ways of viewing the moving image, we are concerned primarily with the many facets of human perception and how we experience, process, and interact with the world. To this end, we use experimental, avant-garde strategies in order to present alternative ways of seeing and being.”
ELECTRONIC MEDITATIONS is an exploration of color, light, time, space, sonic phenomena, nature, environment, cosmic preoccupations, subverted media processes, and perception. Using a series of monolithic video sculptures, video monochromes, processed visions of natural environments, projection, ambient sound, performance, and a celestial black light installation, the Gladdens construct a kind of “secular chapel,” a “neolithtronic” experience at the intersection of art, technology, healing, and environment.
C. Tara and David Gladden, art and life partners, received their MFA degrees from Brooklyn College, where they attended the Performance and Interactive Media Arts Program (PIMA) as a collaborative duo. In 2012, they founded John Cage Memorial Park, an artist residency project on family land in the fishing village of Chance, Maryland. From 2012-2018, they co-founded and curated W.O.R.K., an alternative community art and music space on the Downtown Plaza in Salisbury, MD. Their collaborative work has been presented both nationally and internationally in festivals, private and non-profit galleries, and established and DIY performance venues. They are active members of the experimental audiovisual performance community in and around NYC and have worked with many notable figures in that milieu.
Schedule of Events:
SITE-SPECIFIC OUTDOOR PERFORMANCE on 6/29
MOVING BETWEEN
6:30-7:00 pm
Moving Between is a site-specific participatory performance that re-contextualizes the alley between Harvard Street and Columbia Road as a transformational zone: a threshold which offers an adjustment period for visitors to transition into a meditative state of hyper-awareness after their commute, and before entering the exhibition. From 15th Street to the exhibition entrance at 1469R Harvard Street Rear at the end of the alley, visitors can choose to simply observe, or actively participate in a performance action modeled after a walking meditation. To help form the visual component of the work, participation includes the option to dress in a monochromatic ensemble composed of one color.
IN-GALLERY PERFORMANCE on 6/29
van der Rohe, C. Tara & David Gladden, Mike Hall & Eric Shuster
8-8:30 pm
van der Rohe takes its name from the German-American pioneer of modernist architecture, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, who created his own twentieth-century architectural style, stated with a minimal framework of structural order balanced against the implied freedom of unobstructed free-flowing open space. He is often associated with his fondness for the aphorisms “less is more,” “no noodles,” and "God is in the detail.” The ambient sound project van der Rohe seeks to embody these same principles, expressed through a contemporary, minimal, free-flowing sonic framework.
