Cooper Design Space
860 S Los Angeles St
Los Angeles, CA 90014
The ICA LA and VOLUME, a Los Angeles-based collective of creative individuals dedicated to presenting work by emerging and established sound-artists, invite you to a live edition of Why We Listen, the podcast series by San Francisco-based musician Marc Kate. For this unique evening in the Cooper Design Space Penthouse, Why We Listen will be a live event featuring guest artist Nayland Blake.
Why We Listen is a series of conversations about music and sound, exploring how these sounds come into our lives, and how they affect us once there. Host Marc Kate asks his guests to choose three pieces of music. They then listen to the selections and discuss. Personal histories, production techniques, emotional resonance…whatever conversation the music inspires.
Past Why We Listen guests have included artist Nina Katchadourian, experimental music pioneer Bob Ostertag, former Bauhaus bassist David J., queer performer Justin Vivian Bond, and music critic Geeta Dayal.
About the Artists
Interracial desire, same-sex love, and racial and sexual bigotry are recurrent themes in Nayland Blake’s sculptures, drawings, performances, and videos, which reflect his preoccupation with his own racial and sexual identities. Blake (born 1960) participated in the 1991 Whitney Biennial and the 1993 Venice Biennale. The Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, New York, presented a survey of his performance-based work in 2003, and his work was the subject of a 2008 survey exhibition at Location One, New York. Most recently, the Yerba Buena Arts Center in San Francisco presented a one-man exhibition entitled Free!Love!Tool!Box! In 2012, Blake was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship. Blake chairs the International Photography Center-Bard MFA program and lives and works in Brooklyn. Blake is represented by Matthew Marks Gallery. ICA LA will present an exhibition of Blake’s work in Fall 2019
Marc Kate is an electronic musician from San Francisco who applies cinematic and conceptual approaches to music and audio production. As a response to the tech culture assault on San Francisco (and the world), Kate takes up the tools of the trade — computers and synthesis — and slyly counter-attacks, imbuing humanity precisely where humanity is being evacuated. He produces the podcast “Why We Listen” and co-produces the podcast “Scary Thoughts: Horror, Philosophy, Culture” with writer Chad Lott. Most recently, Kate released the album “00” on Failing Forms and completed a residency at Land and Sea in Oakland, CA titled “Nihil”.
About ICA LA
The Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (ICA LA) is a museum opening September 2017 in a newly renovated industrial building in Downtown Los Angeles. The ICA LA’s revelatory exhibitions of works by international artists, dynamic public programs, and inclusive community partnerships will reflect the diversity of Los Angeles and the world, fostering critique of the familiar and empathy with the different.
