Del Vaz Projects
1526 Armacost Ave., Apt. #202
Los Angeles, CA 90025
VOLUME is pleased to present performances by Gregg Kowalsky and Carver Audain for the second event in its Haunted Formalism series at Del Vaz.
Haunting might be best understood as a form of in-betweeness, a mediated state in which life and death, past and present, something and nothing have attained an unsettling equilibrium. Both throughout history and in the popular imagination, nowhere is quite so haunted as domestic space, where ghosts seem to gather as the residue of their prior, bodily habitation. For the second event in its Haunted Formalism series at Del Vaz, VOLUME is pleased to present two artists working with sound, Gregg Kowalsky and Carver Audain, whose practices explore spatiality and the aesthetic possibilities and social significance of outmoded technologies.
About the Artists
For the past decade, Gregg Kowalsky has been composing and performing electro-acoustic works with a focus on multi-channel, site-specific works with elements of psychoacoustic phenomena. He is most known for his Tape Chants series, which explores the acoustics where the performances occur by setting up cassette players around the space with tape loops tuned to sine waves using only the cassette players’ speakers for amplification. For Haunted Formalism, Gregg Kowalsky will be presenting a new performance sonically activating the entire exhibition space, rendering the listener a co-creator whose location and movements within the apartment determine their perception of the work.
Carver Audain is a multi-disciplinary artist whose practice has centered around immersive environments for nearly a decade. In recent works, Audain observes and confronts the psychology of the social environments within which we are all immersed, as members of a contemporary populace. His media works are the result of multiple rigorous digital signal processes and editing techniques on a variety of aural and visual stimuli. For this event, Audain will be presenting a multi-channel performance of Hibernaculum: Vortex, as well as an excerpt from his most recent installation, “It’s Rarely Simply Black and White.” This latter work repurposes the auditory and visual noise that occurs during the process of electron beams interacting within vacuum tubes as they are projected through phosphorescent screens. Audain thus engages recently abandoned CRT Technology as an acknowledgment of a point in modern history when our ingestion of systematized information was meager in comparison. Based in Brooklyn, NY, Carver Audain is in Los Angeles as PSSST’s Inter/National Resident for September and October.
Haunted Formalism is an exhibition of new works by Bay Area artists Nicole Phungrasamee Fein and Dean Smith and VOLUME’s second residency project. VOLUME will be presenting events every Friday and Sunday for the duration of the show’s run from the 7th to the 28th of October. This event program will explore the theme of haunting not just as an irreducible ambivalence between life and death, but in the broader sense of works and practices that exist between and confound ostensibly contradictory binary categories, such as that of performer and audience, virtual and real, and even time and space.
