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Shows:
The Helm Gallery, Tacoma WA.
April 17th - May 8th 2007.
Info:
Corrupt Media, Corrupt Data is constructed out of business card CD-Rs that were meant to be part of an edition of 100 for a commissioned work. After 53% of the edition failed to duplicate properly, this stack of CD-Rs containing corrupted data lost its functional value. It then became a work in itself exemplary of a media chosen for its aesthetic value rather than its reliability. Corrupt Media, Corrupt Data explores the place of sound art in the marketplace and the point at which a work is given its worth.
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Collaborator: Gretchen Bennett
Involvement: 4.2 sound piece
Shows:
Soil Art Gallery, Seattle WA.
April 5th - April 29th 2007.
Info:
OUR NATURE is a collaborative piece by artists Yann Novak and Gretchen Bennett. Each artist's work involves a cataloging and documenting of their daily surroundings and a translation of the emotional and psychological impact their environments have on them. By removing these objects, images and sounds from their natural habitats, they produce distilled facsimiles of their experiences and, through further refinement, reflections of their personal experience.
In OUR NATURE, Bennett and Novak turn the lenses and mics on each other. Living in identical lofts in the Tashiro-Kaplan, one above the other, the artists filter their creative practices through the spaces they live in and explore the similarities and differences in both their experience of life in that particular building, as well as the surrounding neighborhood. Presenting this work at Soil Art Gallery is an intricate part of the artists' vision. Located just four floors down from the artists' residences, Soil embodies the cooperative aspects of the community in which they live and work.
Novak accesses Bennett’s world and practice through two on location sound recordings. The first recording was made in the center of Bennett's empty loft and catches the subtle acoustic signatures of the space created by the actual architecture and the way Bennett chose to personalize it. The second recording was taken from the windowsill catching the unique urban sounds Bennett experiences each day. Novak explores the push and pull the neighborhood has on his fellow artist by altering these two recordings and uses the Gallery itself as the battleground. Presented as a 4.2 installation, the two recordings replicate an internal and external struggle for prominence. The speakers positioned in the center of the space play the altered internal recording, while the speakers positioned near the windows and entrance of the gallery play the contrasting external recording. The effect is harmonious competition for acoustic real estate, mimicking Bennett's everyday life.
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Collaborator: Alex Schweder
Involvement: Sound Element
Shows:
Suyama Space, Seattle WA.
January 15th - April 13th.
Info:
Designed as a complement to the resting phases of "A Sac of Rooms", the sound work is created from recordings gathered during the installation's active phases. The piece supports the glacier-like stillness of the deflated rooms by creating an icy landscape with references to the sac's past and future.
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Collaborator: Gretchen Bennett
Involvement: Sound Element and Design.
Web site: East River Project
Shows
Soundwalk2007
Long Beach, CA.
September 2006
International District, Seattle WA.
Info:
The East River Project, A collaboration between Gretchen bennett and yann Novak combines online downloads and direct street encounters to activate the public space of the neighborhood they inhabit, The International District. The web site is a base camp for the street installation, where you’ll find a downloadable map with the perimeters of the installation and a downloadable MP3, as well as instructions on it’s use. The order in which the walk should be experienced is completely open, so each view of the work is unique to the viewer, to preserve the element of discovery.
The MP3 contains field recordings made in Brooklyn and Manhattan. These source recordings have been combined and mixed in Seattle to produce a narrative soundtrack for the walking tour.
On the walking tour, multiple Day-Glo orange stencils supplant Pioneer Square concrete and Chinatown pavement with orange silhouettes of the Williamsburg Bridge, The Dominos Sugar Factory Tower and pit bull variety dogs, enabling viewers to experience their environment in a state of hyper-awareness, by referencing a parallel but different landscape. The stencils are made of the same marking paint used by municipal workers to mark gas mains, so the transplanted landscape elements blend with the surrounding street text. The Brooklyn images are dispensed in multiples, enabling them to live on, even as they are receding landmarks in their own Brooklyn setting.
 
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Collaborator: Alex Schweder
Involvement: Sound Element
Shows
Howard House, Seattle WA.
August 26th - September 2nd 2006.
American Academy in Rome
May 27th - May 29th 2006.
Info:
My practice of architecture investigates the permeability of buildings ad the bodies that occupy them. Neither exists in isolation of the other, we design our building to mirror our fantasies, assuage our anxieties, and see ourselves as we would like to be. The history of this relationship has, for the most part, seen buildings designed to reflect back to their occupants and image of their bodies as ideal and undying. I am interested in expanding this discourse to include bodies as they are actually experienced, frail, leaky, temporary, sensual, and messy.
This video projection onto a room filled with fan blown feathers is a space that unfolds and disappears in the space of three minutes. As feathers blow in front of the light of the image the 2 dimensional image extrudes into a space that is perceived as occupy able for only an instant.
-Alex Schweder
