Summer Jubilee, a Residency with Machine Project

Summer Jubilee, a Residency with Machine Project
July 19–29, 2011

Walker Art Center
1750 Hennepin Avenue
Minneapolis, MN 55403
T 1.612.375.7600

walkerart.org

The Walker Art Center is pleased to announce Summer Jubilee, a two-week residency with Machine Project, a non-profit confederacy of artists that makes its home in the Echo Park neighborhood of Los Angeles. Hosting weekly events that span art, technology, natural history, science, music, literature and food, the group supports forms of cultural production that don’t fit within established structures. Beyond their storefront, Machine Project produces projects at locations ranging from beaches to parking lots and has worked with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Denver, the Contemporary Art Museum St Louis. They recently concluded a year-long artist residency addressing topics of public engagement at the Hammer Museum. Machine Project’s practice compliments the Walker Art Center’s summer-long Open Field program, an experimental social platform that emphasizes creative and intellectual exchange between artists and the public.

Invited to investigate the functional, psychological and social relationships between the Walker’s interior and outdoor public spaces, Machine artists will produce seventeen projects under the banner Summer Jubilee. Intimate experimental music will explore the landscape’s sonic potential through customized, one-of-a-kind songs, warm ambient music commissioned for the Walker’s parking garage, and works composed via solar panels that measure the changing light. Skill building activities will teach kids how to break into cars, evoke the spirit of Carl Andre through the hand-crafted pizza oven, and turn ordinary melons into amplified instruments. Machine will also recreate earlier projects such as Invisible Performance Pamphlets, Meet the Earbees, Poetry Phone and a special outdoor performance of Tragedy on the Sea Nymph: An Operetta In Three Acts Starring An All Dog Cast.

Summer Jubilee features new site-specific events including Cowboys and Angels, a 12-day world musical tour of the Walker’s public corridors, featuring Emily Lacy performing wistful country songs and vocal electronica. The residency will culminate in the american lawn, and ways to cut it, a site-specific performance by Chris Kallmyer. This three-part work with tackle the un-mowed field via sheep, the drone of choreographer gasoline-powered rider mowers and a symphony of hand-powered push mowers augmented with bells.

Participating Machine artists include: Mark Allen, Joshua Beckman, Samuel Bing, Elizabeth Cline, Jimmy Fusil, Chris Kallmyer, Emily Lacy, Michael O’ Malley, Adam Overton, Kamau Patton, Sara Roberts, Juliana Snapper, Jason Torchinsky and the Echo Park Film Center.

For a complete list of Machine Project events visit www.walkerart.org

About Open Field at the Walker Art Center

Open Field is a summer-long event-based experiment at the Walker Art Center that investigates the theme of the cultural commons. Inspired by the idea that every community is enriched by collective knowledge and talents, Walker Open Field is a combination of an open university, public park, beer garden, skill-share, and on-going community exchange. Programs are a mix of events organized by artists, the institution, and the public, from small conversations and improvised moments to presentations such as lectures, workshops, demonstrations and a weekly Drawing Club. Placed literally and figuratively outside the Walker’s institutional walls, Open Field embraces the expanding boundaries of cultural production and participation—suggesting the shifting relationships between institutions and their communities.