The Permian Recordings
Phil Peters

LAST DAY TO SEE AND HEAR: SATURDAY, JANUARY 14TH
Open Hours 12-6pm and Closing Reception 7-11pm
5419 Glissman Road, Austin, TX 78702

The Permian Recordings are a series of durational subterranean field recordings that capture the low-frequency vibrations of the Permian Basin in West Texas. This site-specific installation brings the recordings back to Texas for the very first time. Exploiting Co-Lab’s unique concrete culvert, the piece turns the gallery into an enormous infra-sonic subwoofer, a speaker at the scale of architecture. As in previous installations, the work brings into proximity two scales of time: the geologic and the biologic, expressing them not as irreconcilable measures of change, but as part of a continuum. In this specific installation, I imagine architecture as a bridge between the human and the geologic via the symbolic threshold at which foundation touches earth. Architecture is designed to be experienced in human time as the space we pass through and live within, and yet it endures, as in the ruins of our earliest structures, buried in dirt, a ligature to a distant past that simultaneously projects out into an uncertain future. Within this context, the concrete structure becomes a tuning fork on the surface of the earth, resonating with the frequencies of an industrialized landscape. 

The Permian Basin is home to one of the world largest oil and gas extraction industries, while at the same time it is named for a geologic epoch whose end demarcates a period of catastrophic climate change and the largest mass extinction in the history of the earth. The frequencies in these recordings are both document and phenomenon: an aggregate of the hum of generators, the hammer of sand trucks down private roads, and the drone of drill bits churning invisible below the surface. How does one conceptualize a system so large in scope and consequence that it has passed over into the geologic? Standing in a field we hear the trucks and can count the towers and flares, but it’s only when we look down from satellites that we see the perfect grid of exhausted wells stretching for miles in all directions. But what of all we cannot see? The subterranean network of pipes and reservoirs, or the export of these mining technologies around the world, and of course the supply chain of oil whose thick black pipes that snake along roadsides throughout the permian eventually divide into a delicate vasculature that feeds every aspect of our individual lives? There is an anxiety in the infra-sonic, a sound that is felt but unheard. These recordings extend from ancient rocks, passing through the structures we’ve built, and on into our bodies. Entering the speaker actualizes this connection, this linking of stone to flesh through the reverberations of architecture. Listening to these recordings from within the culvert, one is invited to sift through the acoustic strata and reflect on our connection to and participation in these larger terrestrial and climatic systems of which we are a constituent part spanning vast periods of time.

A transdisciplinary art practice exploring the evolving relationship between the built and natural world through video, audio, and sculptural installations. Speculative architectural histories, contemporary ecology, and slippages between the biologic and geologic all inform this work. Phil Peters received an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, IL and a BA from Carleton College in Northfield, MN. In 2014-15 he co-founded and curated an artist-run project space LODGE (In Service of the Dark Arts), Chicago, IL. Recent exhibitions of his work include “Build Carry” at The Arts Club of Chicago's Drawing Room, Chicago, IL; “Volcanic Drift,” at the Galveston Artist Residency, Galveston, TX; “Outside/In” at LAXART, Los Angeles, CA; and “The Port of Long Beach Recordings,” at Canary Gallery, Los Angeles, CA. Phil lives and works in Los Angeles, CA.

How Soon Is Now??
Adrian Aguilera

September 17th - October 29th, 2022
Gallery hours: Saturdays, 12-6pm
5419 Glissman Rd, Austin, TX 78702

“The shape of tentative futures is the cone /
La forma de los futuros tentativos es el cono.”

How Soon Is Now?? consists of found videos exploring occurrences of a single year, 1997, projected on a cone-shaped screen, along with an assemblage of playlists, light-based work, human-scale text, and print works. Together, these pieces might function as non-explicit information retrieval systems.

Devising an invitation to interrogate a rigid, limited window of one year of phenomena is an intimate quest: any research found in the work is about the subject of 1997 and the investigator himself. Stressing cultural artifacts and remnants of late 90s production show us where and to what the artist was anchored at the moment. Viewers will simultaneously locate themselves in the timeline and do their own calculations of relatability.

No form factor is more favored by present-day uncertainty planners, futurists, and forecasters than the cone. Meteorologists, as an example, rely on cone overlays to graphically convey possible paths of hurricanes. A melting ice cream cone is near-perfect hand-held technology demonstrating phase change. The cone might be our best present-day temporal sequencer. 

But the cone presented in How Soon Is Now?? explicitly contains audio and images of a tentative past. Dealing with appallingly complex and appealingly simple nostalgia, the artist constructs a departure point for the future in a different way. Even if we're familiar with the references or spend hours with the installation's music and projection, we can only ever be detached from 1997 as it is arranged in the work.

What happens, always happens now. Presenting evidence of the twenty-fifth anniversary of now requires "screening out" a mass of substantial spectacles. In this single-channel video installation, the screen is not only a visual pun, It is also a supplemental, uneasy device for relationship building: the viewer becomes a factor in the selective interpretive journey. Confronting overlapping, spliced sociological and psychological propositions is to move through heavier material than the light the videos are projected through. An unintentionally weird (it can't not be weird) audio-visual reconstruction of a 365-day moment presented with no obvious hierarchies evolves into a medium and a manipulation --1997 as a nostalgic metric.

How Soon Is Now?? organizes historical records with unashamed sentimentality. The title is on loan from The Smiths but transmits added urgency with double-barrelled punctuation. Reworking a portion of the past, Aguilera encounters his sixteen-year-old self in 2022, extracts some sense of the "historic," and possibly feels the clock ticking. Behind the pop-culture moments are hints of some of 1997's political atmospheres and abundance of generative global accords. Social statements of encouragement felt by all our younger selves.

A dual purpose emerges from a cone's convex lens shape. Typically we look forward through a lens. Engaging with this work, Aguilera invites us to reverse focus from 2022 to 1997 -- crossing invisible lines marking Y2K and the turn of the century. In doing so, we focus retroactively and on contracted shared paths. There's no denying the effect of inverted possibility -- or, like The Smith’s song says, nothing in particular.

Born in Mexico's industrial capital of Monterrey. Aguilera immigrated as a young adult to the U.S., where he settled in Austin, Texas, in the late 2000s. He received his BFA (2004) from The Autonomous University of Nuevo León, México. Working with a variety of mediums that include sculpture, text-based work, print media, public art, video and installations, he researches the intrinsical essence that resides in objects. With interest in scientific observation, cultural history, and social issues, Aguilera's work aboard our relationship with the physical and cultural spaces in which we (co)exist. He has exhibited nationally and internationally at the Alfred University, The Philbrook Museum, The Contemporary Austin, Artpace San Antonio, the Fusebox Festival, The Blanton Museum of Art at the University of Texas, The George Washington Carver Museum, and The Instituto Cultural de México in Paris, France. In addition to his practice, he is an active member of the Austin-based contemporary arts collaborative Black Mountain Project. He currently lives and works in Austin, Texas. @rarospeinadosnuevos www.adrianaguilera.com


Image: Adrian Aguilera and Vania Chew, former co-worker and wife. View of the art department at a Bilingual School, Monterrey, Mexico, August 1997. Courtesy of the artist.

poolboy: I WANT TO LISTEN
Sam Mayer

July 18th - 23rd
Open Rehearsal: Monday, July 18th - Friday, July 22nd, 9-10pm (daily, free)
drop in and out, observe, participate, and get drunk with poolboy while he works
Performance: Saturday, July 23rd, 8:30-10:30pm (one night only, free, please RSVP)
performance, installation, vibes, tunes, karaoke, swimming pool, IRL chaos

poolboy: I WANT TO LISTEN is a weeklong residency in which artistic and personal feedback become the raw material for an immersive IRL performance and party. poolboy00 is artist Sam Mayer’s online alter ego and the subject of poolboy00 (2020-present): an ongoing, durational reality show/interactive memoir/talk show for the streaming platform Twitch. In I WANT TO LISTEN poolboy00 engages in a series of ever-escalating feedback sessions with collaborators, spectators, and archival material at daily open studios. At the end of the week poolboy00 and momgrab (artist Julia Mounsey) are putting on a performance and throwing a big party at the Glissman culvert gallery. There will be a pool to swim in. poolboy: I WANT TO LISTEN is part installation, part interactive performance, and all vibes. 

Sam Mayer is a playwright and performance maker from Houston, TX. Full-length works include THE CUCK (Intramural Theater), POOLBOY2: MAXIMUM CLOSURE (Crashbox), POOLBOY00 (UTNT), CHET'S SUMMER VACATION (Kennedy Center; Intramural Theater; Rec Room Arts), SPITSHOW (Collective48), THE SIN EATER (Frontera Fest), and THE YOLO PLAYS Pt. 1 & 2 (The Silent Barn; Collective 48). His work has been developed with The Orchard Project, The Workshop Theater, The Mastheads, and SPACE on Ryder Farm. He is the recipient of the Chesley/Bumbalo Foundation Prize and a fellowship from the Michener Center for Writers. MFA: UT Austin. 

Julia Mounsey is a director and writer. Her work has been presented at Under the Radar at the Public Theater, Soho Rep, JACK, Dixon Place, the Radikal Jung Festival at the München Volkstheater in Munich and the Deutsches Schauspielhaus in Hamburg. Along with her creative partner Peter Mills Weiss, she was a member of the 2017-2018 Devised Theater Working Group at the Public Theater, the 2017-2019 Soho Rep Writer/Director Lab, and was a Baryshnikov Arts Center Resident Artist in 2019. 

Doom and Bloom
Alex Boeschenstein, Anthony Rundblade, and Emma Rossoff

May 7th - 28th, 2022
Opening Reception: May 7th, 7-11pm
On view Saturdays 12-6pm

Doom and Bloom is an exhibition of prints, sculptures, and sound by Alex Boeschenstein, Anthony Rundblade, and Emma Rossoff. As our world teeters on the precipice of runaway global warming, with pandemic mutations and Satanic Panic revivals curdling inside capitalist cycles of crisis and collapse, these three artists ask the question: how does one make art about and within this in-real-life apocalyptic stream? With a mixture of hope, humor, and horror, their vision invokes the absurdity of being suspended within the bog-water monotony of an unevenly collapsing system, of dangling helplessly by a string, watching on as the outmoded refuse to die. 

Each artist develops their own reflections but with collaborative leakages across works. There is a shared focus on the vehicle and the confined space, alluding to the (im)possibility of escape. Modes of transportation fall apart as the way forward inverts, twists, and coils like a mobius strip. Moving through the culverts, gravity and scale intensify as the familiar becomes estranged. Creatures, avatars, everyday objects, and schematic systems emerge from the rubble weirder than before. 

Emma Rossoff builds constellations of found and crafted objects. For Doom and Bloom, Rossoff has mummified and metamorphosed a collection of forgotten, gifted, and stolen debris into her own nocturnal playpen. Anthony Rundblade is a printmaker and sculptor interested in the residue and reverberation of the found image and object, often framing his artwork in the principles of the Grotesque. In Doom and Bloom, Anthony recalls contemporary media images of unruly passengers duct-taped to airline seats, bound to uncontrollable destinations by future promises and delusions. Alex Boeschenstein is fixated on history, how it haunts the present and how it failed the future. For the exhibition, he materializes rhetorical devices from the homiletics of American religious revivals and subsumes hyper-rational engineering documents he salvaged from an abandoned sulphur mine into realms of eerie illegibility. 

If we are trapped in this sclerotic system’s labyrinth of tunnels, then Doom and Bloom is a playful attempt by three artists to drill a keyhole view with inadequate machinery into the reinforced concrete confining us.

Co-Lab Projects presents:
VOLUMES
Ezra Masch

Featuring: Adam Jackson, Chris Cogburn, Alton Jenkins, Julia Hungerford, Thor Harris, Lesley Mok, Forest Cazayoux, Lunar Rae, Brannen Temple, Line Upon Line, Sean Ripple, Milo Tamez, Michael Davila, Toto Miranda, Gerry Gibbs, and Greg Fox

Last chance to experience VOLUMES!
April 23rd: Closing Performances by Toto Miranda (8pm), Gerry Gibbs (9pm), Greg Fox (10pm), and special return guests for an after-hours jam
GET TICKETS HERE
Sponsored by Ranch Rider Spirits, Tequila 512, Tito’s Handmade Vodka, and Austin Beer Works

Photosensitive warning: this exhibition contains bright flashing lights that could trigger seizures for people with visual sensitivities

VOLUMES is a project by multidisciplinary artist Ezra Masch: an audio-visual instrument that uses a drum set to activate a site-specific grid of lights. The volume of the sound corresponds to the volume of the exhibition space. The system translates sound into a visual language, allowing percussionists to express their ideas 3-dimensionally. It is an immersive, multi-sensory experience that is part instrument, part sculpture, and part performance. Participating drummers explore the relationship between temporal space and physical space, as well as the connection between sound and moving image. The connection between light and sound has fascinated artists, musicians, and scientists for centuries, Masch’s installation is inspired by audio-visual instruments dating back to the early 1700s. His exploration of sound and moving image touches on an array of interests including synesthesia, architecture, technology, and experimental film.

Recent iterations of VOLUMES have been presented at the Icebox Project Space in Philadelphia, PA, and at The Ringling Museum of Art in Sarasota, FL. This Spring, Masch will bring VOLUMES to Co-Lab Projects by activating the interior of a 40-ft long concrete culvert situated on the organization's property. This site-specific audio-visual installation will feature performances by musicians from the Austin area and abroad. Masch sees the work as an opportunity to experiment with the process and perception of sonic performance: “Every performance is unique because individuals bring their own distinct approach and sensibilities to the table when interpreting this audio-visual interaction.” In curating the performances we have selected participants that represent a broad spectrum of musical cultures and philosophies, as each will approach the audio-visual interaction in their own distinct way.

Ezra Masch is a visual artist and musician from Philadelphia. He creates immersive and interactive installations that break down barriers between sonic and visual artforms. His work has been featured in solo and group exhibitions at The Mattress Factory, The Philadelphia Museum of Art, The Icebox Project Space, MASS Gallery, Tiger Strikes Asteroid Philadelphia, TSA NY, IPCNY, Whitebox (NYC), The Visual Art Center (Austin, TX), and Galleria L’Acquario (Rome, Italy). He received a BFA in Sculpture from the Rhode Island School of Design (2004) and an MFA in Studio Art from the University of Texas at Austin (2012). Masch also attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (2011). He currently lives and works in Austin, TX.

VOLUMES at the Ringling Museum in Sarasota, FL: