“A re-enactment of a spontaneous moment that happened on the Queensboro Bridge in November of 2007.
Thomas Dexter- visuals, Maria Chavez- sound. ”
Maria Chavez is an avant-turntablist from Peru who focuses on electro acoustic sound of vinyl and needle. She has a collection of needles from immaculate to ruined that she calls her “pencils of sound” and a collection of records that provide the palette. She has toured with Christiina Carter (Charlambides, Scorses), performed with Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth in her New York City debut, and recorded with London-based laptop artist Kaffe Matthews, with whom she will collaborate on a live sound installation in London in the summer of 2008.
Chavez has curated and performed in galleries and sound spaces around the world, including STEIM (Amsterdam), El Cervatino (Merida, Yucatan), the Kitchen (NYC), and Issue Project Room (Brooklyn), where she was an artist-in-residence for the fall of 2006. In November, she collaborated with fellow turntablists Otomo Yoshihide, dieb13, and ErikM as part of the Wien Modern festival of contemporary music in Vienna. In June and July 2008, she will participate in an artist-in-residency program with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company at the Dia Foundation’s museum in Beacon, New York.
She was recently awarded the Jerome Emerging Artist Grant from Roulette International in SOHO, NYC, as well as a Meet the Composer grant for a Deep Listening Institute performance at SOHO’s Emily Harvey Gallery in April.
Chavez will also be included alongside Ikue Mori, Mira Calix, and Marina Rosenfeld in a book entitled “Pink Noises: Women on Electronic Music and Sound,” written by Tara Rodgers and due to be published by Duke University Press in 2008.Tara’s website
Her sold-out 2005 solo CD “Those Eyes of Hers” “shows indeed a great love for the way out experimental possibilities of turntablism” (Vital Weekly).
Thomas Dexter is an experimental media artist and performer based in Brooklyn NY. His work with audio/visual performance attempts to draw from (and quite literally draw on) film and the histories of expanded cinema and electronic sound. In his performances, part exorcism, part analysis, Thomas employs abstract mark-making and _expressionistic erasure on 16mm film as a way to dramatize the life-cycle of creative praxis; loudly celebrating the interpenetration of creation and destruction. The resulting images are both traditionally projected and sonified through an array of homemade audio synthesizers.
Thomas has damaged projectors at performance venues and galleries throughout Brooklyn and Manhattan including Issue Project Room, Monkey Town, Third Ward, and The Tank, alongside artists such as Phil Niblock, Luke Dubois, Bradley Eros, Zach Layton, Lucio Pozzi and many others. Most recently he was a featured performer in Material Matter; a retrospective sponsored by American Abstract Artists at Side Show gallery in Williamsburg was an artist in residency at The General Store gallery in Elkhorn Iowa.
