Friday May 1 – Monday May 4, 10:30pm
Xeno & Oaklander and Scott Kiernan
Eau de Nowhere
Live concert and video performance
Live chat Q&A with the artists at 8:45pm
Microscope is very pleased to present “Eau de Nowhere,” a live concert by electronics duo Xeno & Oaklander, composed of New York based artists Liz Wendelbo and Sean McBride, with visuals performed live by multi-disciplinary artist Scott Kiernan.
The event, which will be live-streamed on our website, features Xeno & Oaklander playing an approximately 50 minute set — including the premiere of a new unreleased song “Losangeur,” as well as other classic and recent songs of theirs — while live camera feeds from their studio are manipulated by Kiernan and mixed in real time with original footage.
The minimal, elegant, analog synth based songs by Wendelbo and McBride “tend to disintegrate and build themselves back up again, with the aim to conjure up a synesthetic state where a sound feels like a color and a scent.” Sharing equal dedication to analog tools, in this case video synthesizers and broadcast technologies, Kiernan provides visual compositions of the same sensibility and finesse.
This is the first online and remotely executed performance in a series of collaborations between Xeno & Oaklander and Scott Kiernan counting shows on E.S.P. TV, for Optics 0:0 at Roulette (curated by Victoria Keddie), as well as live concerts at Rough Trade and Mois Multi Festival, among others.
Kiernan, McBride and Wendelbo will be available for a Q&A via live chat following the performance.
“Shared signals and streams of images fill the watery nowhere they’re stuck inside. But, after pacing this same space for days, a few puffs of perfume in the music studio cues a reverie. Suddenly, the room has a limit. The walls become defined, and if walls… then a way past them. Jump cut > to the dream of the machines.” – SK
TO WATCH:
A “WATCH NOW” link will become available on this page at 7:30pm ET on Friday May 1st. Passes for viewing can be purchased then, giving full access to video introduction, performance, and live Q&A.A recording of the full performance and Q&A will be posted asap thereafter and remain on view until Thursday April 16, 7:30pm PT.
General admission $10 (Valid through May 4, 7:30pm PST)
Member admission $8 (Valid through May 4, 7:30pm PST)
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Scott Kiernan is a multi-disciplinary artist living and working in New York City. In his video, photo and installation works, electronically synthesized and photographic elements interact to address their own materiality and means of distribution. He is particularly interested in how meaning is formed through stages of translation via technology, speech and syntax. Kiernan was co-founder and director of Louis V E.S.P., an artist-run gallery and performance space in Williamsburg, Brooklyn (2010- 2012) and now of E.S.P. TV (2011-present), a nomadic TV studio that explores the televisual as a medium for broadcast collaborations. This project also birthed UNIT 11, a transmission-based residency program operating from a former ENG van turned mobile electronic studio. He also directs Various/Artists, a project producing audio/visual releases by artists working across diverse media. He has exhibited and performed internationally in venues such as New Museum, Museum of Arts and Design, Swiss Institute/Contemporary Art, Storefront for Art and Architecture, Whitney Museum of American Art, Harvard Art Museums, P.S.122, Anthology Film Archives, Mixed Greens, Ballroom Marfa, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, and the Center for International Contemporary Art in Rome.
Liz Wendelbo lives and works in New York. She is a conceptual artist who works in film and photography, and plays in the minimal electronics music project Xeno & Oaklander. Wendelbo has shown her work at the New Museum, White Columns, Microscope Gallery New York, Agnès B./Galerie du Jour in Paris and What Pipeline in Detroit. She likes to explore connections between art and music, with an emphasis on synesthesia. In her live performances she uses Eurorack synthesizers to modulate analog video and film.
Xeno & Oaklander are a minimal electronics duo (Liz Wendelbo and Sean McBride of Martial Canterel) based in Brooklyn, New York. As artists, they have been deeply involved in the analog synth community since 2004, and have helped promote and inspire the revival of synth wave in the US and throughout the world through their extensive touring and prolific output. Xeno & Oaklander record their songs and film scores in their Brooklyn studio and are known for their commitment to recording on and performing on analogue synthesizers exclusively. They perform both at art institutions and music venues worldwide, and have performed at SF MoMA, PS1 Warm Up, Miami Art Basel, Kunsthalle Zürich & the New Museum NY with sold out shows at Echoplex LA, Elsewhere NY & El Club Detroit. Sean McBride has created original music for artists Dara Birnbaum, Lucy McKenzie & Richard Kern, Jonah Freeman, and as Xeno & Oaklander for artist Fabian Marti. Their latest remixes are for British legend John Foxx.
Microscope Gallery Event Series 2020 is sponsored, in part, by the Greater New York Arts Development Fund of the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, administered by Brooklyn Arts Council (BAC).