Highlights from the Transmodern Installations

Third Floor:

Welcoming Ceremony

Edward Knapp's Oracle booth

Emily C-D

Fourth Floor:

Jackie and Tom

Jackie and Sarada's make-over station, above and below

Marian Glebes

Fifth Floor:

Hermione Only

Ryan

Mike Benevento and Andrew Liang's life-size foosball table

Mike Benevento

6th Annual Transmodern Festival THIS WEEKEND!

The 6th Annual Transmodern Festival (arguably the best thing ever) takes place this weekend on 4 floors (3, 4, 5, & 6) of the H&H building.
Check out their website for more information on the schedule and artists
Highlights include a performance/installation piece by Michael Benevento and Andrew Liang, Transmodern Tranny make-overs by Jackie Milad & Sarada Conaway and roaming performances by over 20 artists including Lauren Bender and Sarah Jablecki Friday evening

Altered States Opens April 5th at Load Of Fun Theater

Frontier Projects, in collaboration with Transmodern and Load of Fun Theater, is pleased to present Altered States, an exhibition and live performance program curated by Jamillah James for the 2009 installment of Transmodern, Baltimore’s annual performance art festival.

The exhibition examines the history of collective action, originating in the 1960s with communalism (made families in hippie and freak subcultures), and avant-garde performance, where elements were borrowed from traditional rituals and ceremonial spectacle. This rubric for performance and artistic practice champions a freedom from creative, economic, and social constraints, and de-emphasizes the singular, commodifiable art object as the end-all of cultural production.

The artists in Altered States have all worked collectively and across disciplines. Delia & Gavin employ music, video, performance, and sculpture to explore mythology, ecstasy, and rites of initiation and celebration as simultaneous expressions of creative and destructive energy. Forcefield, a celebrated collective from Providence, Rhode Island, performed live and on video to pulsating electronic rhythms in hand-knit, colorful shrouds, creating a participatory environment of disorientation and frenzy. Local group Lexie Mountain Boys rely primarily on their voices, bodies, and found objects as instruments, recalling 1970s female-oriented performance art, always blurring the line between theater and music.

Spiritual journeys and character alchemy are documented in the videos of Brooklyn-based artists Zeljko McMullen & Severiano Martinez and EMR, a queer, feminist collaborative from San Francisco. Local artist Jimmy Joe Roche takes on the role of shaman and mystic in his psychedelic, pastiche style of video-making. New Jedi Order interchanges mysticism and new media technology, exploring rave culture as an embodiment of ritual performance.

Working outside of video and performance are Erin Womack, Caitlin Williams, and Sarah Milinski, formerly of the collective Crystal Coven. Womack’s papier-mâché and found object masks have a mysterious, foreboding quality, inviting interaction, while eroding the art object’s status as sacred and inaccessible. Williams and Milinski’s work has a similar, albeit playful, quality with a homespun aesthetic emphasizing craft as an extension of the spirit.

Altered States considers a renewed interest in the aesthetics and performativity of mysticism. Through idiosyncratic performance, borrowed iconography, and the creation of “invested” objects and spaces, the artists in Altered States re-contextualize alterity, or “otherness”, as a psychedelic state of being, and explore the secular, the sacred, and the creative space in between.

Altered States opens Sunday, April 5 at 8 PM, with live performances by Lexie Mountain Boys, Soft Circle (Hisham Bharoocha formerly of Black Dice and Lightning Bolt), Blues Control (Siltbreeze Records), Ra Khuit Noor, and New Jedi Order. The event is the closing party for the 2009 Transmodern Festival and will be hosted by Load of Fun Theater, at 120 W. North Avenue in Baltimore.

Madness on North Ave, The Love Parade and More

The Transmodern Festival was free to the public Sunday, spread out in many little stations and booths near and along North Avenue. Pedestrians were met with all sorts of strange sights, people dressed in trash bags on stilts, a machine with many lips that altered one's voice and dozens of strange costumes in the concluding Love Parade.

The "tea pee"

Zoe Charlton and Cameron of the "good taste committee"

Even though I'm not exactly sure what was going on here, aside from lots of walkie talkies on the ground and these rad dudes on ladders....this was my favorite.

TRANSMODERNMANIA

Erin Womack 's enchanted forest

Its still happening, RIGHT NOW, more reporting when there is time! Til then:

Lauren and Leigh Bender

Get your ass to Load of Fun!


UPDATE:
This is about to be the longest photo essay in the history of photo essays, be amazed we are living in the Transmodern age

Friday night installation and performance pieces:

Jackie Milad's sound and visual whistling installation

Bonner Sale and Rick Delaney

Red Carpet Entrance

Spoon Popkin's Love letters

Xavier Shapiro and Simone offered people's scores for the evening and rapped fortunes

My Score for the evening

Dina Kelberman's video installation "OH"

Third floor

Bonnie Jones's performance installation

Alex Worthington' Artisan Shoppe


Enchanted Forest

Erin's installation was probably the most memorable piece of the evening, making over the Single Carrot Theater space into an alternative dimension, or a portal to another world. With the lights turned down its hard to understand, as the viewer, what you are walking into at first - but then eyes adjust and its clearly an enchanted forest with silver painted birch tree limbs climbing the patterned, silver walls and a large video projection of more trees, and most importantly, a god-like-tree-creature swaying from side to side. If this wasn’t transformation enough, 3 to 4 performers greet you with baskets of dried bean shells and silver rings, welcoming you into their imagined planet.
-With help from Bonner Sale

Saturday night.....is going to be a separate entry.