About the exhibition
Every Sing
Some Sing
Any Sing
This Sing
Or what we might call singinging, both to and away from alongongs. This online exhibition brings together a series of works from some of the artists at NIAD that harmonize with singing things, through fan culture, instrument studies, exploded gig posters from a pole on the studio table, scores and how songs move. I would be lucky caller number 100,008 on the afternoon show *Songs and Ideas You Remember Well* to note the overlaps and -dubs between visual art and music. When they ask if I’ve heard of synaesthesia, I say, “yeah, I think I’ve tasted it”.
Sometimes I imagine something like an image being stuck in one’s head. The iterations of Eddie Braught’s guitars and gear feel like the zone of practicing the same riff over and over again, a psychedelic feedback cycle between hands and heads. I can’t unhear the mouth shapes Dre’An Cox seems to implore from my eyes. The musicological speculations, genealogies and diagrams of Linda Stewart, Jonathan Velazequez and Raven Harper trace how music gets into our bones. Alan Perez and Thomas Harden shape sounds and pocket fantasies like ceramagicians. The concretions and shadows of erstwhile super-somethings KISS are in full effect, with both Perez and Heather Copus, maybe even in small traces in Michael Nuñez’s Skeleton Mariachis. I keep going back and forth on what side of the proscenium line Samatha Kershnar and Karen May’s figures are dancing, which is maybe my favorite kind of show.
And, since no show is complete without a merch table, I’ll urge you while I tune my type to check out the mind-melting array of totes, zines, tees and records, Danny Thach, Ann Meade, Felicia Griffin and Christian Vassell have for you.
It’s a shaggy exhibition, one we might mistake for a mixtape. I even made a little playlist (think of it as the b-side or an aside) to listen to while you browse through and marvel at the works. I’ll also add that many of these works have, let’s say, alternate mixes and live and demo versions available as well, if you want to live out your click-click-click track fantasies.
-Jesse Malmed, March 2021
About the selector
Jesse Malmed is an artist and curator working in video, performance, text, occasional objects and their gaps and laps over and under. Various pre-occupations include: Infinite Gesticulator, Disorganizer, Choir Conductor, Cosmic Concierge, Junk Shop Salesman, Re-Titler, Traffic Caller, Pro Bono Closed Captioner and Imaginary Television Host. He has performed, screened and exhibited widely at museums, cinemae, galleries, bars and barns. His platformist and curatorial projects include directing the Live to Tape Artist Television Festival, programming at the Nightingale Cinema, instigating Western Pole, co-driving the mobile exhibition space and artist bumper sticker project Trunk Show (with Raven Falquez Munsell), programming through ACRE TV and organizing exhibitions, screenings and performance events both independently and institutionally. Originally from Santa Fe, he earned his BA from Bard College and his MFA from the University of Illinois at Chicago. His life in letters includes teaching at UIC, UWM and CPS (through CAPE).
