Mar. 19, 2022・Viscera/Epiphora Closing Reception
Saturday, March 19, 2022, 6:00 PM – 8:00 PM
Compound YV
55379 Twentynine Palms Highway,
Yucca Valley, CA, 92284, United States (map)
By manipulating the text from Clarice Lispector’s “Agua Viva," visual artist Audra Wolowiec leaves only the letter ‘o’ as a pattern for her silk panels and as a score for sound. Joined by singers Stephanie Aston and Mindy Ella Chu, composer Carolyn Pennypacker Riggs will translate these aqueous oo o o’s into music, fulfilling Audra’s “desire for an embodied experience, an exchange, an intimate proximity, how voice communicates in the absence of language,” as she recently shared in BOMB Magazine.
Contemporary dancer Jobel Medina will perform solo material from Lara Wilson’s How to Draw an Outline, the story of a life from before birth to after death. Inside the gallery, Wilson’s dance film installation, Scrape, another part of this work, envisions a long recovery after a disaster. She created it in 2019, while in residence at the Muckenthaler Cultural Center.
Cocktails will be provided by Current Cassis and Joshua Tree Distilling Company.
About the artists
Audra Wolowiec is an artist based in New York whose work oscillates between sculpture, installation, text, and performance with an emphasis on sound and the material qualities of language. Her work has been shown at MASS MoCA, CCS Bard Hessel Museum, ICA at MECA (Maine College of Art), Stony Brook University, and Art in General. Readings and events have taken place at The Poetry Project, Microscope Gallery, and Center for Performance Research. Features on her work include BOMB Magazine, Modern Painters, The Brooklyn Rail, CAA Journal, and Sound American. Residencies include Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, Complex Systems Art and Physics Residency at the University of Oregon supported by a National Science Foundation Grant, Dieu Donné, and Institute for Electronic Arts (iea) at Alfred University. Wolowiec teaches at Parsons School of Design, SUNY Purchase, and directs the publishing platform Gravel Projects.
Carolyn Pennypacker Riggs is an interdisciplinary artist who makes public ritual with sound, sculpture, video, costume, and collective performance. Born in Oakland, and based in the high desert of Southern California, her work concerns liminal spaces, otherworlds, innerworlds, and new and reimagined mythologies. She is the creator of the site-responsive performance ensemble, Song of Eurydice; and the leader of Community Chorus, a drop-in protest chorus. Riggs has presented work at the Getty Center, REDCAT, Hammer Museum, SFMOMA, the Broad, deYoung Museum, CURRENT:LA Public Works Triennial, Anchorage Museum, Portland Art Museum, Printed Matter, Bangkok University, and Berkeley Art Museum, and has been featured in NYT Magazine, LA Times, Artforum.com, Frieze.com, X-TRA, and Rookie Magazine.
Lara Wilson is an art director, graphic designer, independent choreographer, business owner, and writer currently based in Yucca Valley and Dana Point, CA. Originally from a suburb of Detroit, Lara was formally trained as a dancer and choreographer, graduating summa cum laude in 2009 from New York City’s Ailey/Fordham B.F.A. program. She has presented her live art and screen dances to audiences in NY, Southern California, and internationally since 2010. Lara was the creative director and partner of the dance journalism site DIYdancer, designing all three issues of their print journal. She has also consulted for MacArthur Genius Award recipient, Elizabeth Turk, on multiple projects, including the Shoreline Project which was commissioned by Laguna Art Museum. Since April 2018, she has co-owned and operated Compound YV.
Jobel Medina is a Los Angeles-based creative and performer. Born and raised in the Philippines, Jobel migrated to the U.S. at the age of twelve. He received his B.F.A. in dance at California State University, Long Beach and Masters of Fine Arts at California Institute of the Arts. He has been a member of Ate9 Dance Company since 2017, where he works closely with Danielle Agami and performed works by Shahar Binyamini and Tom Weinberger. Early in 2020, he performed at the Walt Disney Concert Hall as an actor/dancer for Simon McBurney's "Weimar Nightfall: The Seven Deadly Sins." In 2018, Jobel was one of six interpreters to perform Tino Sehgal’s “Selling Out, (2002)” at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, CA. As a freelancer, he’s worked with choreographers such as Christopher Bordenave of No1 Art House, Kate Wallich and The YC, Ania Catherine & Dehja Ti, Rebecca Lemme, Keith Johnson, Andrew Winghart, Whyteberg, and has appeared in multiple music videos and entertainment performances.
Caroline Partamian is a sound and visual artist + curator. Her interests are influenced by her training in dance and abreaction– the extraction of dormant memory stored within a muscle, resurfaced through physical movement, of which an individual was previously unaware. By focusing on the process rather than the anticipated result, she encourages what can be revealed when one becomes conscious of their kinetic movement in the process of creation. Her work has taken on the form of compositions, graphic notations, sound environments, books, video, and more. She has presented work at ISSUE Project Room, Grahamstown South African Fringe, BoxoPROJECTS, Marfa Open, Wassaic Project, Otion Front, Flux Factory, Anthology Film Archives, Babycastles, Compound Yucca Valley, and more. She has organized exhibitions at Compound YV, Flux Factory, Freeman Space, Wythe Hotel, Newburgh-Artist-in-Vacancy, and more. She also runs a small publishing press, Weird Babes, in the form of zines and prints featuring artists' and her own works-in-progress and experiments, and Other Desert Radio (with her partner Ethan Primason) as a means of representing the many voices and interests of the California high desert.
