Corbett vs. Dempsey

Eye & Ear
Artist - Musician

December 3, 2004 - January 15, 2005
Opening reception December 3, 2004

This group exhibition assembles a wide-ranging assortment of artwork by musician-artists and artist-musicians, both historical and contemporary, exploring myriad ways that passage between the visual and the sonic can serve as a creative catalyst. Centerpiece of the show is a previously unexhibited 1966 painting titled "Audience" by Pee Wee Russell, the pioneering jazz clarinetist who was also close friends with painter Stuart Davis. Chicago painter Jim Lutes (chair of painting and drawing at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago), who plays drums in the band Tiny Hairs, exhibits a huge canvas along with several very small ones, while his bandmate Mark Booth, an important younger Chicago artist, will hang new work. Two original, never-before-seen sketches for 1960s record cover designs by pianist and bandleader Sun Ra are more rare treats, as are brand new paintings by German saxophonist Peter Bratzmann and recent collages by Dutch drummer Han Bennink (one of which has also served as a record cover), both of whom have maintained serious careers in the visual arts. Dave Coleman, the Seattle drummer who recorded with Billie Holiday and Dexter Gordon, was an accomplished painter, and EYE & EAR includes one of his oils on board from the early '60s. Two vivid prints by erstwhile drummer Terry Nilssen-Love, now one of the most respected visual artists in Norway, will also be on view. Another important piece in the exhibition is "The Sacking," a large, never-exhibited 1963 oil by Bob Thompson, the African-American painter whose expressive figural works were central to the new jazz scene in NY in the late '50s and early '60s. Though he died tragically young in 1966, Thompson was treated to a major retrsopective at the Whitney a few years ago. He was, in addition to being a painter, a jazz drummer of note.

Seminal Canadian filmmaker, artist and pianist Michael Snow will show an early cubist painting of a jazz band, circa 1948, a piece that shows the simultaneous influence of Picasso and jazz on his nascent avant-garde vision. New York's great No Wave drummer and electronic improvisor Ikue Mori has designed elegant covers for the Tzadik label, mini mock-ups for which will be on display, as will Sam Prekop's original cover painting for the first Tortoise album. Milwaukee improvisor Hal Rammel's astonishing pinhole photographs and wooden "fishhook" sculptures, Sicilian trombonist Sebi Tramontana's "Unfolding Story" artist-books, and German sound-installation artist Christina Kubisch's ultraviolet photos and abstract speaker diagrams will mark other directions that the sound/sight analogy can be taken. Folk singer Michael Hurley has created bizarre animal characters that populate both his songs and his paintings, one of which is included in the exhibition. And blues guitar legend Jody Williams, who recorded with Bo Diddley and Howling Wolf, will exhibit two of his uproarious decoupages. One-time Chicago composer and saxophonist Anthony Braxton will display one of his graphic scores, while Argentine saxophonist and clarinetist Guillermo Gregorio (performing live at the opening) will exhibit one of his early concrete paintings, made in Buenos Aires in 1962. And one of the very first graphic scores, "Plingaling," from 1949, by key Swedish modernist artist Olle Bonniér, will be on exhibit for the first time in North America. The show will also include works by musicians Mazen Kerbaj, Milford Graves, Lou Mallozzi and Floros Floridis as well as artists William Schwartz, Eric Lebofsky, Helge Jacobsen and Tristan Meinecke.

A limited-editon CD, produced for the exhibiton, will include never released music by Bratzmann and Bennink, as well as an unheard and terrifically surprising duet by Michael Snow and Pee Wee Russell, recorded in Chicago when Snow was very young. Other tracks include an acapella Sun Ra song, from the '50s, music by Dave Coleman with Dexter Gordon, and new, previously unreleased pieces by Hal Rammel, Mark Booth, and a duet by Lou Mallozzi and Sebi Tramontana.

A coproduced evening of films at the Gene Siskel Film Center (December 5) will feature PORTRAIT OF PEE WEE RUSSELL, Jud Yalkut's 30-minute film of Russell painting, as well as Michael Snow's masterpiece NEW YORK EYE AND EAR CONTROL, the film from which this exhibition takes its name. Also on the bill is a short film called ANATOMY OF CINDY FINK, which includes footage of painter Larry Rivers playing saxophone in Alfred Lesle's studio.

Includes works by Michael Snow, Floros Floridis, Sebi Tramontana, Olle Bonniér, Mark Booth, Bob Thompson, Jim Lutes, Milford Graves, Tristan Meinecke, Dave Coleman, Pee Wee Russell, Michael Hurley, Mazen Kerbaj, Lou Mallozzi, Hal Rammel, Sam Prekop, Eddie Balchowsky, Peter Brötzmann, Han Bennink, Sun Ra, Fred Lonberg-Holm, Helge Jacobsen, Christina Kubisch, Guillermo Gregorio, Jody Williams, Terry Nilssen-Love, William S. Schwartz, Ikue Mori, Anthony Braxton, and Eric Lebofsky.

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