8-channel system: A Multi-Channel Audio-Visual Performance by Gretchen Lawrence
Sunday, November 3, 2024 at 2:00pm
Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Gallery
Free and open to the public
8-channel system is a multi-channel audio-visual performance by Gretchen Lawrence taking place within Justin Caguiat’s exhibition Triple Solitaire. Found speakers with various input sources are scattered across the room, looping, glitching and overlapping—forming arrhythmical patterns. The speakers are invisibly mapping the locations of/memories in demolished and converted buildings in the former factory district of the Rotermanni Kvartal in Post-Soviet Tallinn. The 8-channel score is devised as a play, comprised of characters and forces of influence, each inhabiting their own speaker. In concert they narrativise building a new contemporary Estonia, slowly erasing all identifiers of its past occupation. This event is curated by Blue Marcus.
Gretchen Lawrence (b. 1997; Tallinn, Estonia) is a performance and audio-visual artist working with found objects and digital media. At the center of her approach is a process of rendering accidental resources into subjects that map an identity matrix of a first generation post-Soviet capitalist consumer. Apple loops and skinned furniture within Lawrence’s collages are animated as rhizomatic nodes through their interactions with each other. These create a map of the artist’s critical reflections on Western visual culture which she sees as characterized by chance, mass production, and cycles of nostalgia.
Blue Marcus (b. 2000, Portland, USA) is a London-based curator, artist and writer. She received her BFA at Central Saint Martins in 2024. Her curatorial practice concerns the assemblage of networked images and objects. Marcus methodically constructs a thesis substantiated by critical academic theory and observes the ensuing choreography that takes place between the works. Her research marries disparate methodologies from the scientific method to the spiritual and poetic. Marcus curated the group show Vampire Junkie at Rose Easton, London, UK (2024) alongside the release of her book The Contemporary Hieroglyph (2024).
Image (detail) by Gretchen Lawrence